When beginning you either have way to many ideas and don't know how to make them or you have no ideas but you know you want to make something. Here's a list of projects to work on that will give you more hands on experience with programming. (This list will expand over time)
Note Scaffolding App
This app can be written in any language and is something I rewrite every time I a learning a new language. I have a set style to notes that I try to take daily. This set of notes contains the following sections: Notes, TODO, In Progress and TODONE. The notes also have the name of the file at the top of the file in this form as well: notes_YYYYMMDD.md . This file is in markdown which is something that helps making readable markdown information a bit easier. What is great about this project is that it allows you to use the time library in a given language to get the date and at a minimum gets you to learn about the basis of file operations. Tutorial to come. If you are just getting started I suggest you write this program out in your language of choice and if you don't have one then I suggest Python to begin with. You can find the sample notes app project here.
Personal Website
Put together a site that can showcase your resume, projects and education. This creates an online presence for you as well as allowing you to show off your projects. You can do this either by creating the page your self or using templates or a site building tool or framework. For instance this site was created using Ghost.
Website/Email Validation Tool
Create an a tool in your preferred language that will read a given piece of html and find the links in it. Then loop through those links and ensure that they return a 200 (successful) response when called. If any links are not working alert in some form of output. Additionally you can create an app that will take screenshots of either an email or tool as if it were in various browser or email clients to see if the designs look like how you imagined.