Easy: keep your day job. Work night and weekends on something you are passionate about.
Where to find cool stuff? As a programmer, the world is your oyster: there is a 100:1 ratio of people with ideas vs. people who can implement them. You probably don't know that I run a website to help people find such ideas: http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjects
If nothing else works, there got to be some open source project which you think could use some serious rewriting. In my case, I wish I had the time to design a better shell (bash just isn't smart enough for the way I work - if you ever used the Mac MPW in the late 90s, you know what I mean).
For others, it's a better, smarter GUI framework. I also think you could build something really cool to display Google search results: coverflow is just one starting point, but you can easily beat Google at the display part because of their fanaticism with providing simple page results. There is a better way for sure.
Where to find cool stuff? As a programmer, the world is your oyster: there is a 100:1 ratio of people with ideas vs. people who can implement them. You probably don't know that I run a website to help people find such ideas: http://fairsoftware.net/publicProjects
If nothing else works, there got to be some open source project which you think could use some serious rewriting. In my case, I wish I had the time to design a better shell (bash just isn't smart enough for the way I work - if you ever used the Mac MPW in the late 90s, you know what I mean).
For others, it's a better, smarter GUI framework. I also think you could build something really cool to display Google search results: coverflow is just one starting point, but you can easily beat Google at the display part because of their fanaticism with providing simple page results. There is a better way for sure.