Have not done any coding in the last month or so, aside from helping a friend out with some Javascript. Have not felt the familiar urge to hack in a bit, my projects at work have been feeling old and busted (and now I’m on unpaid leave anyway), and the mess of personal projects that I was ADDing all over started to seem unoriginal and wheel-reinventing. I then graduated from college and lost any and all motivation to do anything. Have just been spending days watching TV and reading random stuff online. Needless to say, there was no inspiration to write anything either.
This worried me. Have I burned myself out?
I’ve decided that no, I haven’t. I am, however, tired of reading about the same Web 2.0 bs. I’m probably slightly annoyed by the MSFT/YHOO mess. I do need to refocus my personal projects and start applying the framework-ey stuff I’ve written to some sort of project (and I do have an idea) instead of testing it on my personal website.
The view/controller part of the framework needs to be pared down even more – I’ve decided there’s no reason to use reflection to appropriate POST and GET variables. That can be done within the action. It also needs a new name.
The package-manager-like script I had been working on (duffel) just needed a scope reduction. One of the reasons I stopped working on it was because it started to feel like I was reinventing a bunch of stuff, and it was about to do a lot of the work that subversion already does anyway. Instead of managing packages, it will simply manage variables. Instead of configuring which files to get from where, the package creator will simply define what files contain what variables, and place appropriate comment code in the files themselves to specify where the variables are to be replaced. This can then be used as part of a shell script which will check the latest code out of svn, then figure out what variables need to be updated within the trunk code for the local configuration
When I actually get back to working on all of this is still an open question. I’ve decided that I need time off, and what better time to take a break than in the month and a half between graduation and my start date at Yahoo? Peace!… for now.
Reinventing is ok, it’s how you catch up to those before you (I still do it rather shamelessly). So long as you realize it, which you have, you can take your lessons for what they are and try something new which will kill the burnout. Or get crunk.