The dead-end projects can still be interesting and challenging, and you can learn a lot from them if you're just treating them as personal development. My firs

The dead-end projects can still be interesting and challenging, and you can learn a lot from them if you're just treating them as personal development. My first involved preparing a user-generated-content website to scale to 200 hits/second. The second saw us attempting to squeeze an HTML animatic editor (like storyboards, but with music and audio) onto a 7" tablet with severely limited memory and CPU. Of course, as I mentioned above - sometimes just "this is gonna make me a better developer" doesn't quite cut it for two-three years. It's easier to find motivation if something is a challenge and you reckon it's got even a slim chance of making a difference in the real world.