The advantage of solving real issues with a learning project
In my developer life I developed many little applications and libraries to see, how to deal with API’s, special programming techniques or new languages. My reason to stop my experimental work before getting something useful was everytime the same thing: my movitation was gone or another experimental code was more interesting than the current experiment or feature. The same thing happened happened to me in the ZFXCE. I tried out a new technique, but before finishing this ( because I get no benefit of it ) I started something new. So in the redesign phase I deleted a lot of deprecated and not working code.
But some experiments were finished successfully: the experiments, which implementations have solveld a real issue. So how can I use this to have more success in my bigger projects like the ZFXCE. In the ZFX-Community-Engine we have one major issue: we don’t have any customers and no projects, which needs new fatures.
So what can I do to improce this? It’s quite simple: develop a testgame / testproject parallel to the engine-development. Hopefully this will increase the functionality of future developments.