1. To build upon my knowledge and understanding
2. To make use of the latest web technologies that I may not otherwise get to experiment with
3. To make my life easier

Of course there are further reasons such as gaining recognition for building something truly awesome.

Tell me more

As I said, I don’t have anything concrete to work with at the moment and the penned ideas really need fleshing out. What I can say is that the project is likely to take the shape of a web application utilising HTML, CSS with a database and a dynamic language; PHP or Ruby are current front-runners.

The last time I did some serious PHP development was when I wrote a content management system for my University dissertation and even then it wasn’t any of the object-oriented/MVC/framework-driven PHP5 stuff I hear so much about today.

With Ruby I would literally be starting from scratch. Whilst I have had a little bit of exposure to it, I own a Ruby on Rails book, I can’t remember the first thing about setting up a development environment, connecting to a database or coding views. As the project is intended to build upon my knowledge, it would be a good place to learn something new.

Timescales

As Project52 is getting a lot of publicity of late I’ve decided to develop my project alongside it. I don’t expect to provide weekly updates as to my progress on the project but I will keep you informed of any significant findings/developments along the way.

Committing myself to Project52 gives me about a year to plan, design, develop, test and launch the project. As this is only intended to be a personal project, there’s certainly no intention to charge people to use the end product (unless it’s super awesome of course), a year should be plenty of time to produce a polished application.