The time-boxing ensure this stays at the hobby level, and regularly project B becomes difficult too to kick you back into project A.
I too do exactly the same. Most of the time it's some quick rails app[1] or some server side scripts that do something I never did before (like parsing mails, pg stored procedures or some jquery[2]).
Do you have some links to your side projects/no-burnout-work?
[1]http://diffuse.it/ (a blog that is actually used by me, my girlfriend and 2 friends :))
I have one side-project ongoing (that I will mention here later on) and another one for after.
I have learned a lot on each of these projects - bits that have most of the time been reused shortly after on customer projects (sphinx, mongodb, jruby...).
Comments
The time-boxing ensure this stays at the hobby level, and regularly project B becomes difficult too to kick you back into project A.
I too do exactly the same. Most of the time it's some quick rails app[1] or some server side scripts that do something I never did before (like parsing mails, pg stored procedures or some jquery[2]).
Do you have some links to your side projects/no-burnout-work?
[1]http://diffuse.it/ (a blog that is actually used by me, my girlfriend and 2 friends :))
[2]http://31337.it/
Do you have some links to your side projects/no-burnout-work?
Sure (although a lot are websites that were shut down later on, to focus my resources):
[1] http://www.learnivore.com (ruby,rails,iphone screencasts aggregator)
[2] http://www.toutpourmonipad.com (ipad case finder for the french market)
[3] http://github.com/thbar/opaz-plugdk (an experiment to create VST plugins using JRuby and Java)
[4] http://github.com/thbar/music-labs (more music stuff with ruby)
[5] http://github.com/thbar/petite-lettre (a little ruby gem for inter-process communication based on yaml)
[6] http://github.com/thbar/magic (a DSL to make it easier to implement UI with IronRuby, WPF and Windows Forms)
I have one side-project ongoing (that I will mention here later on) and another one for after.
I have learned a lot on each of these projects - bits that have most of the time been reused shortly after on customer projects (sphinx, mongodb, jruby...).