Aug 23 2007
CF Foto Post 0.1
Over the last few years my career has been slowly drifting away from web application development (programming) and more toward the leadership and management role that may or may not be an inevitable next step for me. While this is not a negative thing, it is not the direction I want to be going. I still truly enjoy designing and programming web applications and I have no problem continuing down that road until I am ready to move on. This is one of the reasons I left my previous job; I was getting behind on the technical curve and the tools in my tool bag were becoming outdated.
In my new position I am once again designing and coding web and software applications; however, I am not getting everything I was expecting out of the new position. My current job has me doing about 75% maintenance and 25% new development. I would like to be doing 25% maintenance and 75% new development. What to do? It essentially boils to down to two options: Stay in current position or find a new one.
Well, despite my whining about my current job being only marginally better than my last, I am not unhappy where I am. For the most part, I like the people I work with and I am slowly earning new tools for my tool bag. And, most importantly, the job is rather low-stress and at the end of the day and week I am usually left with enough energy to learn new skills and write applications on my own. That is enough for me, and that is how I came up with the idea to start an open source project where I can design and code until my heart is content, learn the new marketable skills, and provide some quality, free software to the ColdFusion community.
So, over the last few weeks, in my spare time, I have been brainstorming, documenting, designing and developing a ColdFusion-based photoblog. Over the weekend I posted the 0.1 version of CF Foto Post on RIAForge (an open source repository similar to SourceForge, but for projects written using Adobe products). Being a photographer, the choice to write a photoblog was an easy one. The fact that there are no other photoblog projects on RIAForge is an added bonus (Who wants to reinvent the wheel?).
Open source is new territory for me. In addition to honing my technical skills, this project provides the opportunity to delve into this new world of collaborative application development. However, I will not just be developing the application, I will be managing the project, as well. My lofty goal is to make CF Foto Post the most used ColdFusion-based photoblog on the web. I certainly cannot accomplish that by myself. I need contributions from a variety of developers with different skillsets to fulfill that goal. This is the appealing aspect the open source movement and the part of my project that I look forward to the most.
I have a long way to go until the 1.0 release, but the project has started, and that is important. Hey, look at me. I am writing code again and having fun.