I have always felt that every software leader should from time to time get back to the basics and do some deep dives into focused technical tasks. Such as writing automation code for any tedious task that you have one of your high paid developers doing manually.
So what do I do? I need to get back to the basics and do some hard core hacking. What does that mean? I have been actively contributing to several open source projects over the past few years. Open source is very rewarding, but I think doing a large project in my first language (C) will remind me why I love programming. Maybe write an operating system; my own BSD distro? Or maybe a new language?
Carlos Gabaldon 