NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian O'Connor]

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 <zippy1981 at 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nyphp.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20100121/20d6fc60/attachment.html>