Title: I've been working as a developer at the same job for almost 5 years. While the work is somewhat interesting and challenging, I'd hardly say it's something I'm passionate about. On top of that, I'm working with proprietary technology in a proprietary programming language.<p>My problem is that I don't have much inspiration to come up with my own project ideas. I'd like to do <i>something,</i>  but I feel like I'm dry on ideas. I'm not looking to create "the next hotness" or to become some Social Media Kingpin. I'm really just looking to do something fun and useful, that others might find useful as well.<p>My problem is - or, rather, one of my many problems (because I surely have more than <i>one</i> problem) - is that my hobby, my passion is programming. The problem therein is that programming - at least in my mind - is akin to writing poetry. If you're a poet and the topic of all your poems is poetry (whoa, that's meta, dude), well, you're not going to be a very profound poet.<p>I'm a programming nerd. My dream project is, "Hey, we need someone to develop an infrastructure for scheduling and running thousands of jobs on hunreds of different boxes and to keep the status of said jobs, etc." But that kind of makes me an architecture astronaut which, supposedly, is A Bad Thing (tm). And, besides, the above problem has been solved many times over.<p>I guess my question is: what should I do? What do you do for inspiration? How do you come up with your personal projects? When do you find time to do them outside of work?
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