My advice? Write personal projects where you can tell people to go to hell ;) Let me elaborate for a second though: when I work on a personal project, if I want to implement a functionality and there's a library that does it, I write it myself anyway. If I need functionality and I don't really want to write it, I look for a library that does it.
Personal projects give you freedoms that professional ones can't. If your personal project isn't quite as stable because you rolled your own middleware in Node instead of using something that's already built, you can tell people to go to hell. These are projects that exist first to let you explore, interact, and build. Perhaps they exist second to provide utility to you. Only as a distant third do they exist to provide utility to others.
Now, that isn't to say that such a project can't or won't evolve into a professional one, or that you won't decide to make utility to others a higher goal. At that point, you'll have to see about revisiting some of your early decisions. But to me, what keeps things fun in that context is exactly that: creating something for me and no one else. Because then there are no rules and no constraints: just a canvas, a paintbrush, and paint.
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My advice? Write personal projects where you can tell people to go to hell ;) Let me elaborate for a second though: when I work on a personal project, if I want to implement a functionality and there's a library that does it, I write it myself anyway. If I need functionality and I don't really want to write it, I look for a library that does it.
Personal projects give you freedoms that professional ones can't. If your personal project isn't quite as stable because you rolled your own middleware in Node instead of using something that's already built, you can tell people to go to hell. These are projects that exist first to let you explore, interact, and build. Perhaps they exist second to provide utility to you. Only as a distant third do they exist to provide utility to others.
Now, that isn't to say that such a project can't or won't evolve into a professional one, or that you won't decide to make utility to others a higher goal. At that point, you'll have to see about revisiting some of your early decisions. But to me, what keeps things fun in that context is exactly that: creating something for me and no one else. Because then there are no rules and no constraints: just a canvas, a paintbrush, and paint.