I was in batch[1] and worked while doing HS. The plan was to work two days a week, but it quickly turned into two days a week for 10 hours plus some time in the evening after HS and some time on Sundays. But after 3 months, I learned two new programming language (JavaScript and Go), messed around with jQuery (before HS I couldn't even write an ajax request; that's how afraid of front-end development I was), contributed to a framework(http://brubeck.io/), put out my first pypi distribution (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/recurlib now deprecated, but still), wrote my first real-time web app (https://github.com/jordanorelli/chatify), twice (https://github.com/jordanorelli/gochat), met some of the most interesting people I know, and came out with a number of new friends. Oh, and in that off time, I also wrote a startup(http://barkbox.com/). Was it easy? Fuck no. I had no life outside of programming while it was going on, and I promptly took a much-needed rest from programming over the holiday break. It's difficult and definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you're willing to take three months to do nothing but code, it can be done. Thanks to HS, I'm a significantly stronger developer now than I was three months ago.
Would I change anything if I had to do it all over again? Well, I'd probably have started looking at Go and JavaScript a bit earlier ;)
Would I change anything if I had to do it all over again? Well, I'd probably have started looking at Go and JavaScript a bit earlier ;)