What I've been meaning to do (although I haven't yet...
misinterpretation of the virtue of Laziness) is mix the
skills in a project. For instance, to keep my Perl up to
date and improve my Unix and DB skills, write a script to
parse syslog, insert entries in an appropriate database,
and generate reports. (The syslog parser would run as an
hourly cron job, the report generator as a daily one.)
This keeps me practicing my Perl and DBI skills, gets me
more into schema design, and involves me in such things as
syslogd(8), ipfw(8), and so on. If I decide to make
pretty-printable reports, this project could get me into
PostScript, and so on.
So the basic idea, for me at least, is to work on things
that involve a broad range of skills. This is a bit
difficult to do at work, since I usually get handed the
Perl part of a given problem, but for personal projects it
tends to be pretty easy. I haven't run into too many
problems that are particularly narrow in their focus.
--
:wq