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 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.