I have a serious projects problem. Not only do I have my academic "bread & butter" projects (FamilyRelations/Cartwheel, paircomp, and motility), but my academic side projects ("bogs", a rewrite & extension of the binding site software we published earlier), my old academic projects (at this point limited to semi-supporting old script hacking I did over the last few years so that we can publish the work), some consulting work (collar), my simple OR mapping software (cucumber), a bunch of Python bug/patch fixups, the various random WSGI stuff I've been talking about here, and the support code for various projects (things like PBP hacking & code coverage analysis tools), but I've got a few other things planned, too. Like khmer, a genome-scale k-mer analysis toolkit, and a project I plan to call "annotated python" that I hope will help me explore some ideas about certification & distributed annotation that I plan to apply to genome annotation some day soon.

This may be the real reason why many OSS projects never reach 1.0, Ned... too many projects per person!

Some of these projects are essentially my version of thinking out loud. But all too many of them are being used by other people and need to be supported; all of them (with the exclusion of my old academic scripts and some of the WSGI stuff) are being actively used by me in my research. Waste not, want not...

It's extraordinarily advantageous (for me) to be able to take a break from one project and attack a different set of problems every so often. Moreover, often I can get a good angle of attack on one problem by solving another one. For example, my need to write a flexible conference submission system (collar) lead to the design/implementation of my OR mapping (cucumber) which in turn solved some of the problems I was having with my bioinformatics system (Cartwheel). Another example is paircomp & motility: I needed a C++ library to load/manipulate comparative sequence analyses, and a C++ library to search for flexibly-defined sequence motifs. Initially they were used in FamilyRelationsII, my FLTK-based visualization GUI, but they then became very handy for some as-yet unpublished work in comparative sequence analysis & the motif analysis that's part of bogs.

My belatedly defined New Year's goal is to bring paircomp and motility up to 1.0 this year. Both of them are C++/Python toolkits being actively used by at least one group external to my lab, and I'm pretty happy with the APIs. Just gotta get some serious testing into motility.

Oh, and I want to graduate. Soon. No snarky comments about time allocation, please -- it's too easy to make fun of me ;).

--titus