I'm not very good at programming, I'm certainly much much worse at it than you. I feel that with effort, willpower and a good manual I could write giant programmes - I'm learning so it'd take a lot longer for me to do that it would someone competent and the result would be full of stupid bugs but I could probably have a go at it. The main reason that I never *have* decided to have a go at it is that there is nothing that jumps up and down at me and says 'write me' - it would need to be something I want a solution to not something someone else wanted (because I'd take forever over it and my solution would suck) but something that was sufficiently motivating to get me to direct Time And Effort at it.
*nods* Yes, I'd certainly agree that a problem you personally want to have solved is a lot more motivating than one that somebody else would quite like to see sorted out.
I'm not entirely sure where writing-for-pay comes into all of this, come to think of it; I've mostly been thinking about it with my free software hat on, in which motivation versus time and effort and hassle are about the only factors. Presumably there are people who find that they're quite capable of originating large projects when being paid to spend seven hours a day doing so, and just don't feel like doing it again when they get home.
Writing-for-pay definitely makes a big difference for me. Programming is what I do for a living. I want to do something different as a hobby, so pretty much all the programming I do not-for-pay is one-off scripts to solve a specific problem, and work don't pay me to write entire programs from the ground up.
A tentative third for this line of reasoning - could this be 'need for variety' maybe? The more interesting my work coding is, the less desire I feel to hack on my own projects in the evenings - I'd rather spend the time juggling, spinning poi, or other activities that are quite different to what I spent the day doing.
However, coding is quite probably my favourite hobby - so if work is being dull then I start to need to do something interesting with code in the evenings to feel like I'm still indulging.
I think my one 'big program' was the University Card web interface, and it was *hard* work to do. If I'd been doing it for fun there'd have been no chance, but I had a small team of people utterly depending on me doing it and doing it properly, and it was what work were paying me to do, and so it got done.
I think on the whole I do prefer fixing existing things, or planning out "what needs to be done" given a problem than coding things from scratch. Certainly I've not really missed not having another huge project to write from scratch on my own. I've learned that I'm very dependent on feedback for motivation and "this needs to be fixed right now or bits of the university can't do their jobs" is fairly strong motivation.
My two non-software 'big projects' (2002 DWCon Gala Dinner, my wedding) both struck me as being 'just good enough' rather than having everything in them (in terms of the process and organisation) that I originally thought of. For both, I did have a good overall design, but I didn't implement every bit of it and some bits were frankly slapdash and only rescued by the efforts of other people.
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I'm not entirely sure where writing-for-pay comes into all of this, come to think of it; I've mostly been thinking about it with my free software hat on, in which motivation versus time and effort and hassle are about the only factors. Presumably there are people who find that they're quite capable of originating large projects when being paid to spend seven hours a day doing so, and just don't feel like doing it again when they get home.
However, coding is quite probably my favourite hobby - so if work is being dull then I start to need to do something interesting with code in the evenings to feel like I'm still indulging.
I think on the whole I do prefer fixing existing things, or planning out "what needs to be done" given a problem than coding things from scratch. Certainly I've not really missed not having another huge project to write from scratch on my own. I've learned that I'm very dependent on feedback for motivation and "this needs to be fixed right now or bits of the university can't do their jobs" is fairly strong motivation.
My two non-software 'big projects' (2002 DWCon Gala Dinner, my wedding) both struck me as being 'just good enough' rather than having everything in them (in terms of the process and organisation) that I originally thought of. For both, I did have a good overall design, but I didn't implement every bit of it and some bits were frankly slapdash and only rescued by the efforts of other people.