Nurturing my pet projects
I’ve been dabbling in web design and development for 10 years now, and for as long as I can remember I’ve had one or more pet projects on the go. At the start of the year I decided that I’d like to devote some more of my personal time to these pet projects, whether that means playing with some of the newest toys like HTML5 and CSS3, or simply finishing writing some long-neglected functionality to improve the project as a whole.
I sometimes struggle with the common problem of finding time to devote to pet projects, making sure I don’t neglect my day-job or my fiancée and while some people may advocate working until the early hours of the morning, it’s not an option for everyone (and I like my sleep), but as Elliot said recently: “A pet project is for life, not just for Christmas
So, for my second #p52 blog, I thought I’d write a little about the pet projects I currently have on the go and list some of the immediate goals for each which I hope to achieve in the next few weeks. I decided to cut some straggling projects loose and concentrate on two, for now.
coffeepowered.co.uk
I’m in the middle of a complete redesign of my personal site — including this blog — in an effort to consolidate some of the contrasting elements I have here & there. The new site will have a portfolio section which features some of my work in a more detailed way than on my CV.
Goals for Jan/Feb
- Complete and release the new design
- Continue with Project52
homeofmuppets.com
This is my long-term pet project. Created in 2001 this site revolves around a small group of friends from various parts of the world and still chugs along despite the rise of social networking sites over the past few years, albeit in a stripped-down form. Last year I started a rebuild of the codebase in the CakePHP framework, and it’s still missing some core functionality.
Goals for Jan/Feb
- Implement OAuth based user login/registration
- Finish the design rollout
What about you?
Are you nurturing any pet projects? What techniques do you use to make sure you’re devoting enough time to them and not neglecting them? Hit the comment box below and let me know!
Tags: p52, pet projects
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 11:36 and is filed under Productivity, p52. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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5 Responses to “Nurturing my pet projects”
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oooh! New design coming soon? I’m looking forward to seeing it! It’s good to write down these goals, as they often embarrass you into action. I too have about 8 different personal projects on the go… and one that I love, that has been delayed for almost a year shall come out this month (hopefully)! Good luck to you on your projects too
Thanks Kat! I’m hoping to be done with it in the next week or so but I’m hanging onto it as long as possible. I have a habit of throwing up half-done designs as soon as I can for personal projects, but then I quickly fall out-of-love with them (which happened with the current ‘leather’ design). I’m at a bit of a crossroads at the moment as the design idea I originally had has gone in a completely different direction than I envisioned, so I’m currently re-working a lot of stuff. It’s all good fun though
You’re right about how writing about pet projects ‘embarrass you into action’, I’m hoping that’s the case! I need a good kick every now and then!
Well, as I suspected, I couldn’t wait until it was 100% finished to roll out the new design
@stanton re:pet prjects. I’ve started playing poker again (and mean to do it properly this time)….going to sign up for poker school
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stanton, iphigenie. iphigenie said: RT @stanton: I blogged yesterday about my pet projects, do you have any that you're working on this year? http://bit.ly/4G5pBk [...]