

Ask HN: How do you develop your weekend projects? - GB_001

When looking at various HN "Weekend Projects", most are so well made I sometimes contemplate how the developers can organize and polish their project so well over the span of a weekend.<p>So I became curious on how the HN community approaches developing their weekend projects.<p>What are some of your individual approaches?
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marketmonkey
I launched my weekend project with one thing in mind:

SHIP IT!

Most projects are just that, projects. They very rarely turn in to a business
or even make a penny of profit. I tend to build something that either a) I
will use or b) Something that will teach me. But, you need to make sure you
don't go down the rabbit hole of development. Have a goal in mind to ship by
the end of the weekend, even if it doesn't look great, work exactly right or
behave just the way you want it to. It never will, there will always be
something that you want to change. That's a good thing. Iterative design and
development works.

I'm not advocating the release of useless MVPs with poor design or webapps
that frankly don't work. What I am saying is that when you give yourself a
deadline and stick by it, you can learn a huge amount about yourself. Try it.

I built <http://www.livelystocks.com> last weekend because I already used a
_very_ basic version of it on my local machine. I thought I would give a
little back to the HN community. So, I published it. It hasn't gained much
traction, I didn't expect it to, but it still got a few hundred people
interested and many people use it every day. I managed to learn a new
programming language, get to grips with Twitter Bootstrap and I'm pleased
about that. More importantly, it taught me how to properly ship, in a very
short timescale. And I enjoyed it.

~~~
GB_001
Thanks for sharing. By the way that is a very well made application, I really
like clear UI.

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dangrossman
I suck at design yet I start with design. I'll make up a header and logo in
Photoshop then transfer it to HTML & CSS, and at that stage block out a
content area and footer. For me, doing this lets me envision the end product
and get myself excited about getting to it quickly. Part of what's exciting is
that I'll have something to show people at the end, so not looking like crap
matters to me.

After that I figure out the data model, create whatever database is needed,
open up the docs for whatever new tech I'm learning (that's usually the point
of a weekend project for me), and get to coding the actual app.

This past weekend I made <http://bookmarkly.com> to learn Backbone.js and a
bunch of other related things. It's pure JavaScript on the server and client,
and I had to build a screenshot generating server for it too, which bled into
the week. I'll probably post a "Show HN" after I give all the code a second
pass, I'd like to open source the site.

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thiagofm
Don't waste time with design: use twitter bootstrap, jquery UI and stuff that
let's you do it later.

Know the ins and out's of auth and stuff that most of web app does have.

Know what the hell you are building -- development/programming is impossible
to master so you will spend most of your time googling shit and fixing errors,
try to minimize the amount of time spent.

Know how to emacs/vim/any text editor that makes you productive.

Know how to deploy fucking fast.

