

My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend? - pmorel
http://www.romku.com/blog/2011/07/my-weekend-project-what-can-you-really-do-in-a-weekend

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wccrawford
"It may have taken just the weekend to build the project but it doesn't
include all the initial learning."

By that logic, everything takes a lifetime. That's not a useful metric.

No, those weekend projects really did take a weekend. They started without the
project before the weekend, and they had the project after the weekend. That's
a weekend project.

~~~
div
I always assumed a weekend project was just something you worked on in your
free time, typically, your weekend.

So imho, weekend projects are not necessarily wrapped up in a 2 day stint.

~~~
misuse-permit
Here I was thinking that a weekend project meant no more than 2 days of work.
I hope the majority holds your opinion, or the people on HN really are 100
times more efficient than me.

~~~
mirkules
Yeah, I'll second that. I was pretty intimidated knowing that people on HN are
so much more efficient than me. That in turn motivated me, so I'm kind of
disappointed that these didn't actually take 2 days of work. Still, some
weekend projects are pretty motivating regardless of how long they took.

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wes-exp
Not only do I not care if a project was completed in a weekend...

I don't care if a project came to someone in a dream and they wrote the code
onto their bathroom mirror with their left hand, while shaving with their
right hand.

I share some of the author's sentiment, but let me be clear: I'm sure some of
these projects actually are finished in a weekend or less. But my view is that
I don't care about that. Let's focus on the value of a project itself. How
long it takes could be useful information for the purpose of critique, but
doesn't need to be a central feature like "wow, you're coder superman".

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PaulJoslin
People who are serial entrepreneurs or just people who like building things,
get good at building things (quickly).

We learn to use the right tools for the job, we use new light weight
technologies and we build our own frameworks and scaffolding to allow us to
build things quickly.

We make the mistakes that take up all our time on previous projects and avoid
them on the new ones we do.

We have a plan of action right from the start and know what we're going to be
doing each step of the way.

The first time you learn something, whether it's programming, building
something for the web or even just trying to use a certain API - it will take
a lot more time than the future iterations. However, it's this process that
will allow you to get more efficient in the long run.

A weekend truly dedicated to building something in one sprint can be far more
productive than weeks or months of trying to fit in occasional hours of work
in our spare time. Don't forget also, that a dedicated weekend (inc Friday
evening) could be a total of 54 hours (if you don't sleep), as a comparison a
bootstrapped project may only have a few hours a week available - therefore
the same objective will take months to complete.

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dasil003
I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Is it to call people on bullshit?
I mean yeah, a lot of people are full of shit about their accomplishments, and
that tendency is only encouraged by the internet. But complaining that the
time spent learning the tools is not included just sounds whiny. I fail to see
the benefit of posting something like this.

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decadentcactus
I'd say HN is primarily read by people who already understand that it takes a
while to learn these things, so it basically IS a weekend project.

If a non-technical person came along and saw it they may need clarification
that no, you probably couldn't do it as well. But for most purposes it's
understood that the person has been programming for longer than the weekend
itself.

Also, as nickbw said it also gives an idea of the seriousness of the project
rather than anything literal. A "weekend project" or so would (to me) mean
something that may not last forever, but it was fun and different to try out.

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shiftpgdn
I built <http://wwww.casePop.com> and <http://www.seedcrafting.com> in a
single evening (each), but they will never truly be finished as I'm constantly
wanting to add more things. But a basic, usable project was done in about 12
hours.

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thesmartace
In general, 'weekend projects' might just something that you work on in your
spare time (ie. weekends) but then again we do have things like
<http://nodeknockout.com/> and <http://railsrumble.com/>

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pawelwentpawel
I usually spend more time thinking about an idea than actually coding it.

"It may have taken just the weekend to build the project but it doesn't
include all the initial learning." - ... and all the code snippets/classes
that you have done in previous projects and might just use them again.

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flocial
I guess "My Freetime Project" would be more accurate but probably wouldn't get
much votes.

Still there's a lot people can do in a weekend, more so as a team. Startup
Weekend (Foodspotting is alumni) and Rails Rumble come to mind.

Ycombinator Weekend Audition anyone?

------
andrewcross
Just tried to click on the link and it wouldn't load. Anyone else have this
issue?

~~~
socksy
Article text:

Several headlines on HackerNews (HN) have caught my attention recently
regarding weekend project. Here're some examples:

* My weekend project: MongoDB implementation in Ruby

* Show HN: my weekend project, Imagestash - a bookmarklet+ for image collectors

* Show HN: My 15 minute project: PimpMySalary.com

The last one is what made me write this post. Can you really build a website
in 15 minutes? The purpose of the projects mentioned is not of importance and
I am not trying to criticise the work accomplished. What I am curious about is
did it really take 15 minutes or even a weekend to create these projects?

It takes months or years to learn programming language, databases,
networking... Frameworks, apis, and modern programming language makes it easy
to develop but you still need to learn about them. It may have taken just the
weekend to build the project but it doesn't include all the initial learning.
That is my problem. It makes it sound so easy to develop an app or a website
when actually it requires a lot of effort.

Also ideas need to mature and it may take several days or weeks before
implementing the idea. Chatting with friends, searching for similar
implementations, finding and registering the domain name takes time.

I have been working for months now on my project and as I record the hours
spent, I know it is more than 500 hours and the website is far from complete.

Can we be honest with the time we spent on our weekend project and simply call
it "My project"?

