Hi folks,
To cut a long story short (or at least shorter) I used to be a designer / developer / programmer but of late (past 4 or so years) I've been merely a consultant working with products that other people have designed and developed. Now it may sound sad - even to fellow geeks - but I miss the creative process and the challenge of actually creating software rather than implementing and customising software created by others. As such I'm wondering if there's a good way to keep my skills and interests alive - but the kicker is that due to the day job / real life it would be difficult for me to commit to a fixed level of effort. So the questions are:
Where would be a good place to go to discuss development - e.g. design and implementation of specific requirements? (I've contributed to the odd thread here but it's not exactly a busy part of hexus)
Does anyone have any experience with contributing to open source projects or other collaborative work outside of their day job?
My interests are pretty wide.
I started out programming (crap) graphical demos and (very crap) games on an Amiga during my early teens (20 or so years ago). Since then I've done various bits - largely back end code including workflow systems, SMS / MMS services (yup, text messaging), web servlets, web scripting, app server hosted 'business service' code, network management apps (fault and performance management), etc, through various jobs.
In terms of specific skills I've spent a couple of years doing COBOL, the odd bit of C/C++ over the past 10 or so years , the best part of 6 years doing Java, a fair bit of HTML, DHTML, CSS and JavaScript and a lot of SQL (including designing schema, not just queries)...
I guess the core of it is that I'm bored and would like a challenge and I'd also like to keep my skills fresh as while my current day job has some design and development aspects it's not that in-depth or low level; these days my job is more about getting new systems up and running, training people, writing white papers and tuning and tweaking existing systems.