Generally speaking, I agree with the advice being doled out here (finding some real-world need, even if it's a small one, and tackling it), but I'd like to add small side bar from another angle.
About 6 years ago, I was brushing up for a job interview. The ad mentioned Swing and I hadn't done any Swing development in some time. So I decided to brush up on the API, both ones new to me, and those I might have forgotten. I tried to think of a single "assignment" for myself that would touch as many real-world aspects of Swing development as possible and decided on implementing a bare-bones spreadsheet. This would require interfacing with a good number of model, renderer, editor, and listener API for JTable et al. After completing the basic integration with all the necessary pieces and essentially fulfilling my own task, I realized I was in need of some spreadsheet evaluation algorithm and lo and behold, I had a Java interpreter library lying around, so I plugged it in real quick. All of a sudden, I had something that was kind of fun to play with -- totally unexpectedly. After maybe 3 hours of intended work to prepare for the interview, I ended up putting in lots more work to turn into a real application and the whole thing developed into my first open source project that I've since leveraged in ways I hadn't imagined at the start. Moral of the story: sometimes just playing around with a few chosen technologies/techniques can lead to knowledge gained, useful results, and just fun On Mar 9, 2:51 pm, Rakesh <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Wayne, > > once you involve other people then there expectations too meet and > ultimately stress. > > I'm looking for a 'reference' project, something that can be reimplemented > in Scala or Ruby, allows me to set up Hudson and some plugins that seem > interesting.... > > The actual project is a means to an end! > > R > > On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Wayne Fay <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The thing about choosing a project based on something I'm interested in > > is > > > that you won't know if its possible or not, requirements may not be clear > > - > > > hey I'm a developer not a customer! > > > You're going about this the wrong way... YOU should be the customer. > > The next time you're doing something and think to yourself, hey I wish > > there was an app that would help me do X, you should BUILD IT. And if > > you don't have any needs right now, either wait a little bit until > > something occurs to you OR ask your significant other/friends if they > > have a need, and use that as the base for your work. > > > I've scratched plenty of my own (and my wife's) itches in this manner. > > In her case, I've built a few things they actually use at her > > workplace, mostly to export data out of one app and into the format > > required for something else (reporting, another app, etc). They really > > appreciate the help and think I'm some kind of super hero as a result > > of a few simple data transforms, and it makes her look good too. > > > Also, this same topic was discussed in the last 2-3 weeks, so check > > the list archives for suggestions from other people. Search for > > "photocrop" to find it. ;-) > > > Wayne > > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > > "The Java Posse" group. > > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > > [email protected]<javaposse%[email protected]> > > . > > For more options, visit this group at > >http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
