Programming Home Projects – Like Playing Nintendo?

Ever since I started programming, I have always had some crazy idea on the side that I would be working on, some project, some program I could write. A few have seen the light of day (Fat Finger Media Center, Pocketblogger, amongst others..). I was thinking tonight, and it dawned on me. Doing development projects on your own, at home, is like playing Nintendo. Why? Well I say Nintendo because that is what we did when we were 8. It is like people that call all types of soda pop “coke”, I call all video games “Nintendo”, ok so we have that down,

Doing development projects on your own, at home, is like playing Video Games.

How is like playing video games? Well, everyone who has played video games knows about it, and here is how it goes. You have this awesome game, but it is 1 player. You and your buddy can play together by switching off when you get killed, or if one guy is better than the other, then the other guy just watches, helps, looks for stuff the other guy will miss, goes and gets chips, beers, looks stuff up on the net, etc, a video game co-pilot if you will. Always have to get that Simpsons reference in there too (From the Episode: Alone Again, Natura-Diddily)

BART (playing a Christian video game while consoling Rod and Todd): Ooh, full conversion!
ROD: No, you just winged him and made him a Unitarian.
TODD (after Bart beats the first level of the video game): Can we play now?
BART: We are playing. We’re a team.
ROD AND TODD: [pause] Yay!

See, Rod and Todd are having so much fun, and so is Bart 🙂 – And also, don’t forget cooperative video games! Working together to get to the end – perfect!

No, seriously though, to me it is the same as doing home dev projects. When you do them yourself, it just isn’t as fun as doing them with someone else, as a team. People can bring different skills to the table, which make things better. (artistic abilities for graphics for example, is something someone else could totally bring to the table, even networking, server setup, backend stuff)

Now, if I could just find some motivated people with some extra time that want to learn how to do some cool stuff, and end up making some cool stuff in the process, all the while having fun, well, then, we would be playing, we would be a team.

BTW: I have a couple cool projects I want to work on, I have them in my head or semi-started, just need to get motivated!