Started working on a new extremely cool project this weekend. Actually I started evaluating it already a few weeks ago, but haven't had time to really code anything before now. It's an open-source project. While I've participated in fixing bugs and doing some minor things for numerous open-source projects in the past, this is the first one I'm planning to do major development work myself. I'm convinced that open-source and Sourceforge like model produces superior quality of code compared to commercial programming models in the long run. It seems that in this particular project lots of good and right design decisions have already been made. Every participant seem to enjoy using state-of-the art tools and best-practices of o-o and making elegant, simple designs to not only achieve the objective but to achieve the objective in the best possible way and style.
When you care enough about programming to compare the implemented solutions to other choices available and try to find the optimal, elegant solutions beautiful in their simpilicity, rather than "just making the damn stuff work", coding suddenly becomes more of a form or art than a mechanical work exercise. I really enjoy working in this kind of environment and with people whose skills I highly respect. To me, it's a wonderful experience that I've actually lacked and missed in the past years of my professional work. It's also sort of "back to the roots" thing for me since I haven't written anything major in Java for a while.
Especially nice is to work with the latest Java SDK and plans to move to 1.5 Tiger as soon as it becomes available without having to worry about backwards compatibility and being frustrated with missing features of some older SDK, as so many times in commercial projects. Being a geek I am, Tiger release is the next big thing to wait for after the release of Opteron and Athon64, which in my (diversed techology interests) books, were pretty big things.
Sorry I can't be more exact on the project yet since I have a bit bigger plans for this one. I seriously consider and hope to make a living with this sometime in the future though it might take a while to reach that point.