Sometime, people will feel boring about  doing the similar thing every day.  They start to lose passion, and feel that
their career grow becomes slow.  How we can handle this situation?   I have some advise to you.
·   Consider to leave your comfort zone. 
Once you stay in a group for long time, you have a comfort zone which make you feel that your job has less challenge and your skill did not grow.  So it is the time to change. 
You can either change to other group or change to other project which you are not familiar with.   Please do seriously consider this because it has importance
impact on your career.  In the future blogs, I will discuss switching or nor switching in details.    In general,  I think changing is always good thing
which you should always consider.   I saw many cases that people switch to other team and lead to better career.   Also, consider that switching to other team
give you chance to learning new skills which will eventually be benefit for you.
 
·      Consider to do some side project.
  My second advise is that considering to doing some side project.   What I found during the past years is that the side projects which people build during their free time
or out of main responsibility tend to have much larger impact that the funded project. As a professional engineering,  we should be self motivated, and self organized.  If I am doing something which is my interests. I will be very passion on the stuff and tend to make this effort continuously.
 
·         Grow your interests
My third suggest is that try to grow your interest to other area.  For example, when I feel boring on daily works,  I usually go to officetalk to know what happens inside Microsoft Today. I like to read articles at www.infoq.com to  know what happens outside of the company.  I enjoy reading Google testing blogs about what they are doing. You can choose an area you are particular interesting and have a good behavior to learning new thing everyday.
Finally, I have some advises for our manager.   Consider to do macro management instead of micro management. Leave people some freedom to do things.  Encourage people to explore different opptunitities.  I know we have commitment and we have task to be finished.  However, making people happy and be motived is more important that delivering a
feature.  A happy team deliveer’s better product and we don’t wantto be always stressful.

To the end,  I am a true believer of google’s 20% time and our Garage project (which I think our SQL Server should do).