This is perhaps another case in favor of something like arhuman's
Workshop Area idea -- a place where new and seasoned alike can
work together, issue and take on assignments and whatnot.
As that doesn't exist (yet), another place you might want to look to
exersise your talent is programming contests -- not necessarily
entering them, but in working old problem sets. I'm thinking of the
ACM programming contests in particular. You can find PDF's of the 2000
regional contest problem sets at
this site, and searching google will turn up other sites with
contests, or past acm contest problem sets.
Now, such contests rarely have useful or practical problems in the
everyday sense, rather, they are usually more abstract
computer-science / algorithm / datastructure related problems
(sometimes couched in real world terms, or as puzzles or mazes or
some such thing). But you might find that working through some of
them with Perl might be a rewarding challenge (perhaps with a decent
algorithm/datastructure book at your side, like the
clr book).
