At the moment my personal project is to write a Jabber bot (yes I know it's XMPP now you stingy people). That project was actually kicked off by accident when a friend of mine mentioned writing one and I started to google around out of curiosity. When I stumbled over jabberbot my thoughts went among the lines of 'well now this doesn't seem too hard...' and the next thing I know is that I was coding away into the night.

It's really fun to do something that doesn't have to do with the web directly once in a while. No need to care about 'how it looks' since, well, its only text.

Pro tip: If you check out the page and think: 'Heck, where are the docs? Two links to the docs of another project and the XMPP specs themselves - that's all?' I can assure you: that actually is all you need. Just have a peek at the actual jabberbot code and the XMPP specs - they surprised me with readability and candy. Well one of those was a lie.