Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I gotta do.

[gement]

I was in continuous motion for over 12 hours yesterday, 6:30 to 6:30. I seem to be getting an awful lot done. I know some of that's hypomania from adrenaline, but I hope some of it sticks. I even bought foods and a vegetable steamer! More running like a mad thing today. I won't touch down at home until bedtime.

So it turns out I'll be significantly more employable at what I really want to do if I become brilliant at SQL. (This is not actually new news.) Unfortunately, I am pretty crap at the usual programmer development path of "just pick a project you feel like needs doing and start doing it." I need more structure, and other people with user demands, and I'm much more inspired by fixing and optimizing than starting from a blank slate.

So! Ideas about how this could work:
I could find an Open Source project and actually provide work on it.
I could find an Open Source project and make a copy to poke around at in a noobish fashion to see what happens.
I could start on something that someone needs from scratch, but that they already know what they need.*

The problem is, the phrase "find an Open Source project" involves learning the language of a whole new community before I even know how to look for projects. So I could use the following sorts of pointers:
Specific possibly useful projects
Where/how to surf needy projects
Some kind of community (blogs, message boards) where people talk about the nuts and bolts of participating in projects, so I can surf from that knowledge to better options
Quick advice on how not to piss people off like a noob.


*I should not be used for anything critical, as I have a whole 40 hours class experience on SQL and related things. I'm really good at it within my limited experience, though; it's exactly my kind of logic problem. I could at least get you some kick-ass qualitative diagrams of how a good system should be structured down to the field level, even if I don't have the hang of all the implementation.

Now off to PT and then a networking lunch and then an interview workshop and then a date and then home, with stops in coffee shops to find three jobs applicable to my experience. Current count: 0. Argh.

On the bright side, yesterday I had a chiro appointment and a shrink appointment and visited the WorkSource office and hit Goodwill and Ross for scads of clothes (16 lovely collared shirts, 3 slacks, and a tie, plus under-tees and socks) and had lunch downtown and worked in coffee shops twice and scheduled to see a bunch of people and bought a vegetable steamer and had dinner with sistawendy and bought grains and scouted a pet store.

Comments

I Haz a Prawjekt!

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

I'm kicking around a project in the back of my head that I could use some help with getting the database set up; I have a fairly good idea of what I want as a big picture, but I'm still fuzzy on the specifics of how many tables and which fields would go in each one, etc. If you're interested, let me know!