Thinking about my own projects, a lot of them fall into your #2 (I chose "yes" for your question for some of my projects). There is a #3 that is missing, at le

Thinking about my own projects, a lot of them fall into your #2 (I chose "yes" for your question for some of my projects). There is a #3 that is missing, at least for me, though. That's the category where I work on something just to see if it will work at all. Sure, I'm unwinding and I'm improving my skills, but I really do want to see if I can accomplish the task at hand. I'll often think something like "if I had never heard of image compression (bitmaps were all we had to work with), how would I go about writing an image compression program?" and then try something new without searching the internet for how compression algorithms work for images. These programs will most likely not do as well as something like jpeg, but they are where derive most of my fun from. Maybe some day I'll come up with something truly novel, and then I'll probably panic because I won't know what to do with it.