Ask HN: How do I beat the solo development blues?

I'm currently working solo doing client work in my own company, which I set up after my computer engineering degree. It's great experience and I've learned ALOT about business and development, but I feel there's a big gap in my knowledge as far as working in a large dev team is concerned.

I figure I have 2 options:

1) Join a big company on a large project.

2) Develop in the open source community.

Option 1 would go against my entrepreneurial/hacker spirit.

Option 2 would be nice, but I code in cakePHP and there's no interesting or active cakePHP open source projects to contribute to (Except maybe the core code.. which is a little out of context for me).

What is one to do?

My idea was to wrangle up some cakePHP developpers and start building a library of plugins and components for common things that I've coded (multiple file uploads, authentication, user management, site news, photo album, forum, etc..). I figure I'd share my code with people and we'd collaboratively work towards the best solutions towards all these problems. Kind of like a cpan for cakephp.

Is this a good idea? Does anybody want to join me? Does anybody have any other ideas?

4) learn a framework other than CakePHP.

Working on an open source project is extremely different from working on a large corporate software project. For example, there are few consequences for missing deadlines (if there are any deadlines), there is little to no management structure, and there are no perpetually changing requirements that you have to meet. There are plenty of things you can learn from working in a large company from both positive and negative examples, and it sounds like you want to learn those things.

I don't see how working for a big company would be more against your entrepreneurial/hacker spirit than school was. You're going there to learn something. It won't always be pleasant, but it's a means to an end.

Also, as an entrepreneur, you'll eventually have to manage people. I assume it would be much harder to do a good job of managing people if you've never had a boss before.

Yeah another framework would be good. How about another language?

I think it's critical for developers to continually learn new technologies as they arise. This helps you stay sharp and remain competitive in the marketplace (whether you are an employer or an employee....)

If you just stick to the same framework all the time, you're going to find yourself out of touch with the modern programming world pretty quickly (again, either as an employer or an employee.)

ouch!