Two days ago I was at the concert of Tool which was part of the Metal Hammer Festival in Katowice. It was their second concert I've been to, so I knew what to expect, but it still made an incredible impression. Why am I mentioning it? Besides the fact that I'm a big fan of their music, it was the first opportunity for a very long time to forget about my work, to meet and talk to interesting people and to rediscover various areas of life that I've almost forgotten.
Even though many things have changed for better recently, especially concerning my work, I'm still far from being satisfied with my life. And it occurred to me that the main reason is that I'm simply bored with things that take most of my time. I got a new project and it was quite an adventure, but now that it's reached a usable state I'm mostly doing project management tasks. And it's been more than year and a half that I've been working on WebIssues, with no longer break than a week or two. So even though I still have a lot of ideas, I feel that I must take a break and start doing something different.
WebIssues was meant to be something that people would actually use, and even though it's not widely known and doesn't have a lot of users, I think that goal was reached just enough to let it live on its own for some time. But the main reason I'm doing this is simply training my mind, not allowing me to forget the raw power of C++ in the "managed" world that live in and forcing me to think creatively rather than just following the customer's requirements. So now I would like to switch to a more conceptual project, something that I could simply enjoy when playing with.
There's no need to invent the wheel, two such projects already exist - Fraqtive and Descend. The former needs rewriting to Qt4 and improving the usability of the UI and seems like a good stepping-stone for a short time. The latter is still more like a contour of the idea, but it keeps appearing in my mind from time and whispering deceptively to bring my attention, so who knows. Well, while finishing the next release of WebIssues I will have some time to make up my mind.