A few years ago, I was in the exact same situation, and I did something similar, I posted on this very group: http://marc.info/?l=nyphp-talk&m=116460542719740&w=2
There were a lot of great suggestsions then that still hold great value today. I've accomplished, and learned a whole lot since I posted that message, I graduated from a top rate university with a degree in c.s., work for a fortune 100 company doing embedded c / c++, however it all started right when I posted that message. If you're doing this from a learning perspective, pick a product you like, and go one of two routes: recreate it or start contributing to it. What I ultimately did was created my own CMS/blog for my site that was awful. It wasn't nearly as robust as Wordpress, nearly as powerful, or nearly as useful, but I learned a lot as I did it. Then I created some programs to try and tie into my current fixation with WoW, which didn't work great either. Then I made a calendaring system, which worked okay. I then redid my calendaring project which worked pretty damn well, but that's about when Google released their calendar product, so I dropped interest in mine. The point here is you're obviously interested in PHP / programming for a reason, so even if something is already done, there's no harm in redoing it from a learning perspective. If that doesn't suit your fancy, well, then I'd recommend learning new languages and frameworks. I'm currently reading a Ruby on Rails book, even though I really don't have a specific reason to - I just want to learn it. I hope that helps. Brian On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Justin Dearing <zippy1...@gmail.com>wrote: > > There's a solution for that, you can do like the rest of us have, namely >> get so far in debt that you can't sit around doing nothing, but instead are >> forced to work. >> >> I find that clients bring more than just inspiration for my work. :-) >> > > I think we all realize that clients pay for projects. For some people, that > is inspiration enough. For others, it is not. Maybe their clients don't have > projects they find interesting. Maybe they are looking for a diversion. > > To put it anther way, we work for others to enable us to do what we want to > do. If some programmer really wants to do something that no one wants to pay > him, whats the harm. > > If I was independently wealthy I'd read more and I'd travel more, but I > probably would still program. There probably would be a period of "ok what > do I program" after I finished whatever hobby projects I had at the time. > However, I'd soon find myself programming again. > > Regards, > > Justin Dearing > > _______________________________________________ > New York PHP Users Group Community Talk Mailing List > http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk > > http://www.nyphp.org/Show-Participation > -- Brian O'Connor
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