>But i said "projects I find interesting" - to me that means learning new things and getting to leverage the brilliance and hard work of the current best and brightest. I like being able to google for answers and to see what guys like John Papa are doing and explore how our current state of development communities is creating a synergy of ideas. i am more interested in that, as someone who is much more historian than techno-geek, as the real story. Imagine if the early 17th century or the late 15th would have allowed for the kind of cross-fertilization of ideas that we have come to take for granted and didn't even exist in our industry 20 years ago.
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recently I had to work on veeery old fpw code - which was a mess. After voicing my displeasure, I was told it had been considered top of the line 20 years ago. And looking back at the original design and the change logs it became clear that most of the garbage was introduced by maintainers who had no clue about the intention of the original dev. And yes, clearing up that mess for about 3 weeks before adding new changes gave that old beast more agility and some elegance. Similar to the "wow" expirience of starting Excel IV or Winword2 on current HW - yes, todays stuff has oodles of bells more, but with the limited resources back then some people did great stuff... Imagine '57 DB 300 SL with fake pipes at the side and spoilers front and rear - the urge to rip that off is much alive when the basic is a classic ;-)