For a while now I've been in a rut. I'm not really sure of the cause, but lately I just haven't had the passion I once had for writing code. The spark seemed to be gone. I really haven't had much of a desire to work on any of my side projects, and getting stuff done for clients sometimes seems like a chore. Maybe it's because we've mainly just been doing tedious bug fixes at work for a while and no new development, or maybe it's because I lost a couple of my side contracts since they're moving away from CF. It may just be a side effect of me getting some non-programming hobbies and focusing my time on something else. Whatever the reason, sitting in front of my computer when I'm not at work is not something that I've wanted to do lately. In fact, I've found myself coming up with excuses NOT to get on the computer. But, that all changed last night.

A couple of days ago I decided to dust off one of my old pet projects and start working on it again. This particular project is a custom Mach-II CMS that I was building for a client. The client knew about it and thought it would be nice to have, but they don't really need it so there's never been a big push to get it finished. It's just something that I worked on in my spare time and if it never got finished it was no big deal. About a year ago, I decided to shelve this project and go with Mura instead (no sense reinventing the wheel, right?). Well, that didn't work out so hot, and I really want this client on a CMS, so last night I fired up Subversion and pulled down my old Mach-II project.

This was the first time I've looked at Mach-II since I stopped working on this project a year ago. Imagine my surprise when within just a few minutes of looking through the code I started getting excited about this project. Almost instantly I was looking forward to doing some development again! I actually had to make myself turn off the computer and go to bed last night. It's been a long time since that has happened, and it's been a long time since I felt like that about writing some code. I don't know what it is, but something about working in Mach-II always excites me. Maybe it's because I'm still fairly new to Mach-II and I'm learning a lot while working with it, but I really enjoy working with Mach-II. So much so, that I even try to contribute to the wiki when I can. As funny as it sounds, what really set off this excitement was realizing that the first thing I need to do on this project is set up autowiring for ColdSpring in all of my listeners.

So, yeah, I'm in full geek mode again. :) Thanks Mach-II, this is going to be fun!

Are there any programming languages or frameworks that you work with that get you excited like this?