As a means of rekindling my interest in web development I have decided to start my own project. I don’t have a fixed idea of what it will be at the moment, but I’ve penned down a few things.There are several reasons I’ve decided to work on my own pet project, the main ones being;
- To build upon my knowledge and understanding
- To make use of the latest web technologies that I may not otherwise get to experiment with
- 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.
Cool to see you undertaking a personal project, can’t wait to see what you come up with.
If you need any advice or help feel free to ask.
Scott, I decided to do something similar recently, I’m in the middle of creating a project management system similar to basecamp. If you’re looking for a challenging idea then maybe you could try something similar.
I’ve developed it so far almost exclusively with HTML, CSS, PHP and jQuery/AJAX and it involves a lot of MySQL work.
I’ve created my own ‘data layer’ where all my SQL sits, but I’m not using an OOP approach. Similar to you, this is something I want to explore more.
I had some experience with Ruby at uni and it didn’t really take my fancy, much preferred PHP so am interested to know your thoughts once you’ve looked into it further.
By the way, I found this site whilst looking for you to thank you for the help you gave me when I first joined MKM, you really helped me out. I’ve just handed in my resignation!
Andy, I had at one point considered building a Basecamp clone but it’s a highly competitive space to make any money from it, and I don’t intend to take on any client work for the application to be of any use for me.
Consequently I stumbled across Open Atrium a couple of months ago which looks to offer the same functionality as Basecamp but as an open source self-install based on Drupal.
Best of luck with your future post MKM and it was a pleasure working with you.