Boredom is probably my worst enemy. When I’m bored I lose interest very fast and generally just mope around wondering what to do. For the last year I’ve been debating what to dive into next to satisfy my creative itch. So have I decided what to do yet? No…but maybe I will soon.

Basically the last sets of projects I got into after YaBB SE and SMF was in Lewis Media. It’s been a few years now and I’m not learning anything. I used the downtime to do nothing productive (you really can’t call high end raiding in World of Warcraft for four years productive) and at this point I NEED to find a project to dive into.

I went from doing projects in Visual Basic for my online baseball league I used to run, to Perl, and then to PHP mostly. So for my last several years I have spent most of my time working with PHP as my main scripting language (along with JavaScript) and I am not sure if I should keep going with PHP or perhaps start to expand my knowledge. Maybe C# or Java, or something useful like that. I kind of miss desktop programming from time to time. Or perhaps I want to hop into mobile coding and make a nice little application or two for the Android operating system for mobile phones?

Well, these are the questions I have asked myself from time to time and I kind of ponder them and then move on to sliding it off to the side. However, it’s time I actually buckle down and come up with something tog et behind.

So what current options are available out there that are already possibilities? There are a handful, all with pros and cons, some I’ve already ruled out for the most part.

Simple Machines: SMF/YSE was a project Joseph and I started up one day when we were involved in YaBB (perl based forum). We wanted to convert it to PHP and a database backend since at the time YaBB was using flat file text storage. The rest of the team didn’t want to so we started our own conversion. It was plenty fun when we were deeply involved and had our hands in there coding but eventually real life forced us out of the code windows and into more administration side of things. The project is in a much different place now than it was when we left it. It has grown into a nice little forum package and while I am asked from time to time to come back I just have very little desire to do so.

Aside from the rampant politics that are in place there and the constant manipulation (which are the main reasons I am never eager to go back) it’s almost a case of “been there done that”. I also don’t want to contribute to a project that isn’t open and at the moment, sadly, it’s not. It has weird, werid ownership and transparency issues that almost feel as thogh people wanted to feel important so treat it like world secrets.

Youra Software Foundation: This is a recent non-profit organization I was involved with in forming along with a lot of old SMF people and spearheaded by an old developer and the old marketing guy there at SMF (Mike and Rick respectively). This is something that is extremely high on my list of things to pour myself into. It, basically, is what we wanted to do originally with Simple Machines. Form an NPO and offer up open source projects from it. Help the projects with marketing and management and more.  I love the concept, I love the guys involved, but my main concern is what are we going to do to start? It needs a project, a flagship project if you will and while a few of the guys have ideas it feels as though everyone wants their own project worked on as the project as opposed to picking one and hitting a home run.

Home Office Pro 2: Ah, my work project. I am currently working on this in my full time job. It has some very interesting challenges and lots of unique things we’re working on with it. I have often thought of just going nuts with HoP 2 and busting out hour after hour of code at home towards this software but there are some problems with that. Will it feel like I’m at work 24/7? If I’m stuck working on some ass code, will I be able to break from that and work on something fun and interesting at home?

An example of working on this project was on this previous Thursday and Friday. I wasn’t feeling the best towards the end of the week so I figured I’d take Friday off as a personal day and get some rest (Thursday was super bad for me). Instead of sleeping I got deep into thought on some HoP 2 things and ended up working on it for almost 10 hours straight and went to bed at four in the morning. It went relatively un-noticed and as a result, it killed my momentum for working on it the rest of the weekend.

Mobile Development: I have a huge urge to dig into Android development. After another friend from SMF, Jay, introduced me to Android I’ve been super interested in this mobile operating system. I stepped through the tutorials and it is pretty straightforward and all, I just have no idea what I’d want to make as a project.

AIR Development: I am also very intrigued by Adobe AIR and what it does. Same as above, stepped through the tutorials and in the end just didn’t know what I wanted to build.

The biggest obstacle for me is WHAT to create. I just don’t have a need for anything at the moment application wise so I haven’t needed to jump in and code something. So I hum and haw for a few days and eventually the feeling passes and I go back to playing my MMOs to kill time. I just don’t have a clue what to work on that would be useful for people.

So who knows really. Once I do find that one project to throw myself behind and it grabs my interest and doesn’t let go, I’ll be all over that. Would be nice to learn some new languages along the way but we’ll see where things go. Hopefully I have something to cure my boredom soon!

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