Writers Block..

I assume that everyone here has a personal project outside of your professional work spaces..
When you finish one project how do you begin another?

I finished my project that I actually started as a project for school not too long ago.. and now I'm at a loss for work. I won't have any more programming classes.. so projects won't fall into my lap like it did.

I do have an aptitude for programming, i've been doing it for a while, before I started college.. but i've never really had a project.

How do you find ideas?

I got writers block! :(

-Kedaeus-

Maybe not suited in the General section, but I can play along....;)


If you don't have any projects consider you lucky. I am allways reading books, and every time I read a book about programming I am getting new ideas. I am mostly doing graphics and game programming, so one project takes a lot of time. So I can probably find 20 ideas in my head right now on projects I want to do. I will never finish half my ideas. And I am constantly learning new stuff, so when I start a project I want to redo a lot before I am finished, becuase I am always learning new stuff. Like HLSL, that could be used in my new game, but I havn't done it yet. So maybe I should redo something.


So how much do you know about programming. And what do you want to do. Do oyu want to learn new stuff, or just play around, or make something usefull...

I know quite a bit actually.
My brother got me into programming when I was a kid - I messed around with Basic, then VB 4.0, 6.0, and now I’m reading books on Vb.net and C#. I've been mucking around, aimlessly, with programming along time.
Up until this year I haven't taken any formal instruction on any of the subjects listed above.

I wrote an IRC client.. Which works well. I could redo it in .Net but that would be like re-inventing the wheel. And I didn’t get a lot of satisfaction out of that project because I found the solution I was looking for in Trillian.
I also wrote a POS terminal application for a boutique in school - my instructor said I did very well on it, one of the best he's seen come out of a student in 15 years of teaching.

As far as having the knowledge I can figure out just about anything there is to know - I just don't have any ideas.

I have one project I DO want to do but it requires money and special equipment - both of which I don't have at the moment.

I have access to a lot of books online - many of which I’m in the process of reading. I guess I’ll keep doing that until a problem falls in my lap.

-Kedaeus-

And to answer your last question.. All of the above.
Learning and Fun are my first objectives - before I started the Networking program at school I wanted to go to FullSail in Orlando Florida, the bad news is they raised tuition on me by $5,000. It was already over my budget when I decided to enroll - so I went to ITT-TECH here in Dallas. The school didn't offer a programming course - so I enrolled in Networking :mad:
The usefulness of an application is in the eye of the beholder.

I always though of myself as looking for a career where I can learn and play; with programming I could go home and work on personal projects. With networking.. heh, well administering a home network is like watching the grass grow; a 5 year old can do it.

My computer at home is running IIS 5.0, Fully Configured Web Server, Private FTP, and Mail Server, With SQL-Server 2000 installed… It’s no use to me If I can’t utilize it. And still I have no ideas.

Try writing your own graphical and user-friendly operating system? :) That could be very interesting, and would probably be a worthy challenge if you have the patience to see it through... and it would look good on a resume too. Heck, if you make a really good one, you could oust Microsoft from its throne and introduce Kedaeus-ows to the consumer market as the cheaper, stabler, faster, more flexible and more user-friendly replacement for Windows! Fame, fortune and fulfillment in one easy step! :D

Yeah OS is a nice thing to write. Or maybe a compiler. Or an game engine. All those things are both fun and educational.

But a compiler is very hard to make properly; to debug it you need to fix both the compiler's code and the code you're testing the compiler with :) Double-whammy!

:wave: :wave: If you want ideas, could you develop a scenario for Aom? I have got a decent story line. Its based on Indian Mythology. Haven't got the resources. If you are really really keen, maybe we could build up a game of sorts.

Cheers,
Abhijit