Posting from 30k ft: Cool Projects, Free to a Good Home!

Posting from 30k feet over north eastern Canada

Yes, I'm flying back from Prague today and we have wifi here on the Lufthansa aircraft. It's both expensive and power draining but amazingly it actually works. I don't know if should call it the coolest thing ever or scream because they have now taken away the only completely network free time left to us. sigh The march of technology, I guess. At least until the battery runs out.

Free Stuff

I'm sure that many of you are like me. You get a crazy idea for an interesting project or demo. Most of them remain a page of notes in a folder somewhere but some you develop further. Some actually make it to an entire proof of concept, demo, or even something completely functional. And then you leave it. This happens to me a lot.

Sometimes I come back to these projects after a while and sometimes not. After about seven years of this habit I have collected quite a few dusty directories of interesting code. I always keep them there, hoping that one day I'll come back to it. Occasionally wiping off the cobwebs, prying open the cover, and taking the project for a spin. I always think, one day I'll clean it up or clean it out. Well, that day has come. I'm giving away my projects.

I work on too many projects. My time is limited due to work, getting married, and a few very important open source projects that I must continue working on (more on those soon). So now I must accept that I will never be able to revisit most of these old projects. They are just taking up space. So rather than delete them I'd like to give them away to a good home. Some of these are interesting demos, some are the beginnings of cool applications, and some are useful libraries. And I'm giving them away for free, but with a catch:

So here's the deal. Starting Monday I will be giving away one project away each day. These projects range in scope from little demos to full applications. I'll also give you a sneak peak of a new secret thing I'm working on. If you are interested in projects of these I'll make you a deal. You can't throw away the code. You must build something with it and at least send me a screenshot. You can lie and send me a Photoshop mockup if you like, just don't actually tell me that you dumped the code in a ditch somewhere by the side of the road. (under a tree, in a moat, behind the old haunted amusement park). I'd rather you just tell me the code is living happily down on the farm tending rabbits named George.

So that's the deal. See you Monday!

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Posted November 17th, 2006

Tagged: java.net