Staticmethod

I used to be really involved in open source software, it was easier back in college when I had more time to focus on that kind of stuff. Not that I don’t have much free time now, I just find myself spending it in other ways that really aren’t productive at all. It’s not even that I’m burned out on programming from my day job, it’s just that when you’re not getting paid to write the software it has to have some intrinsic value to motivate you to work on it.

Every once in a while I get what I think is a great idea and do about two days or work on it. Then one of a couple things starts happening:

1. I find out that someone, somewhere, has already written my idea and that, even if it’s not better than my idea, they’re way ahead of me in terms of development
2. I quickly realize that my goals were big and after a few days of free time working on it I’m not really seeing anything useful shaping up

For the first item, I’m not really sure what to do to combat that, except to realize that it’s very rare to come up with an idea that someone else hasn’t already come up with. I think that maybe unique overall ideas may be hard to come up with, but that it’s easier to come up with small changes to an idea that lots of people have done already.

For number two the solution is really simple: start out with implementing smaller projects. I think I need to sit down and brainstorm for a little while and just come up with a long list of really small projects, ones that I know won’t take more than 1-2 days of a couple of hours at a time to implement. Anything much longer than that and I face the chance of burning myself out.

So, to summarize: I need to come up with small, quickly implementable projects and then just ignore stories on Lifehacker about the “great new project X” that does exactly what I thought of (those stories always seem to come out a day after I start implementing something…)