What is your preferred pastime programming project?

Question

By pastime programming project, I refer to any programming you do that's in your spare time and not work-related per se, although what is learned can be applied to work. I like using Processing to create generative illustrations. I do front-end web development for my work, and as you may have guessed, find it far less interesting.

I am interested to see how people's own programming agendas differ from their professional ones.

EDIT: not an exact duplication, but see also:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/157319/do-you-have-a-hobby-development-project
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/201189/what-do-you-do-to-keep-learning
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190191/favorite-personal-projects
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15747/what-are-your-favorite-learning-projects-and-why
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/102310/pet-projects-should-we-each-have-one

Answer 1

I write robotics controllers now at work, so I'm pretty satisfied. I study algorithms and data structures and do problems on Project Euler in my spare time.

Answer 2

My three current side-projects are:

1. A program that grows music on a cell phone
2. A fisheye grid for viewing huge tables on a small screen
3. A neural simulator for defeating captchas

Work is the usual boring get-data/edit-data/send-back-edited-data kind of programming, so the side stuff keeps me interested.

Answer 3

I do hobbyist game development. Keep projects small, and use them to learn about new languages (Flash, Python, and C# are a few languages I've learned through game dev), new tools (SQL, Regex, 3d math, verlet physics integration), and even things like project management are all helped through hobbyist game development.

Answer 4

SSMS Tools Pack. It's an Add-in for SQL Server Management Studio 2005, 2008 and Express versinos that offers quite a few additional gui options.

It's quite interesting seeing how it works under the hood.

Answer 5

I actually enjoy web development, which I do for work. So I combined that with my other favorite activity, playing quizzo at bars with my friends, and created a web site that lets other fans of quizzo search for games in their neighborhoods and rate them.

Of course, since kids came into the picture, I've had no time for that. So now my past-time programming project consists of developing a spreadsheet where my wife can enter the number of feedings, wet diapers, and dirty diapers per day per baby.

Answer 6

I work on various website projects, usually backend stuff and some kinds of front-end widgets. I lose focus quite fast and nearly all of my stuff never goes out of development.

The projects I finish, I stop maintaining them in order to move on and try new and more interesting things. I have a bunch of inactive websites online, waiting for new content that'll never come, and I'm still making new plans for new sites every few weeks.

Answer 7

Most of the time im writing ABAP-Code (Web Dynpro) at work, but that doesn`t satisfy me at all and dont really like ABAP. Besides work, I program in C# (also did a little XNA-Game), Java and Python (beginner).

Currently Im doing research in test-driven development.

Answer 8

I current develop/maintain/support a suite of "tools" for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG that is out there. They are designed to help players and judges get more out of the game and also have a repository of all the cards available in the game. I originally joined the development team to work on a single project, but when things fell out, I slowly inherited them all.

While it has been crazy to keep up with, it has been very rewarding because I've head to deal with things like creating a common data library to share between the applications, dealing with WinForms client issues, working on a stable auto update feature, and much more. I'm almost done with 2.0 of all of these applications in light of what I've learned from the first time through. I'm using it to try out the new WPF framework, as well as leverage SQLite even more than the applications currently do.

All in all, it has given me a great chance to venture out of the typical ASP.NET/IIS/SQL2K5 stack that I deal with at work and explore some more of the features .NET has to offer. I've even debated about the idea of working things into the Mono framework, since there are handful of MAC/*NIX users out there that want to be able to run the apps without using an emulator or virtual machine.

Answer 9

The little spare time I have is pretty chopped up, seldom more than an hour at a time. I find ProjectEuler to be an excellent pastime to satisfy my hobbyprogramming needs.

Answer 10

Solving the problems of http://www.projecteuler.net in Haskell, both to improve my problem solving skills, train creative and mathematical thinking.

Answer 11

Pretty much the same webdev as I do at work, just about subjects that I've chosen and without irritating clients (well, not too irritating). Boring answer I know, but:

Find a job you enjoy and you'll never work a day in your life.

Answer 12

My main project is a framework for evolutionary computation. But in the process of developing this, I also ended up writing a lot of code for working with random numbers and combinatorics, which I span-off into a separate project.

I've also found myself hacking together a reporting plug-in for TestNG. More from need than interest, but it seems to be more popular than my other projects.

Most recently, I have resurrected an old program that I wrote several years ago.

Answer 13

Creating very small systems in PHP and messing around with Wordpress.

Answer 14

My private project is a C99 standard library. I wanted to do something precisely specified and cleanly documented, something I don't see often in my professional work. :-)

Answer 15

Professionally I do web development (asp.net and SharePoint) and integration with MS CRM.

Outside work, I'm working on a 3d UI to allow interaction with the OS, written in C# and WPF. Its fun....

Answer 16

I'm enjoying messing around with the iphone atm. Been a while since I've used C and I'm finding Objective-C excellent - it brings C up to date enough without descending into the morass of time required to master that is C++. I've also done a lot of graphics coding in the past so focusing on the 3D OpenGL aspects (and I may have a game out soon :-). I find coding to produce visual results particularly rewarding.

Professionally I'm an independent consultant/developer, particularly SQL and Web backend development at the moment.

Answer 17

Coding test cases for StackOverflow of course!