My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
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Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#2"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.
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#3You can do a lot of things in a weekend. I think the author fails to see the difference between a weekend project and a viable business product.
I see a weekend project as something exploratory, to show your friends, get cred. A viable business product will surely take longer than a weekend to develop.
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#4"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.
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.
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#5"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.
I agree... including time spent learning doesn't make much sense to me, though I agree with the writer's point that the "real" time is much greater than a weekend.
We built v0.1 of http://queued.at in 36 hours of coding at Dallas startup weekend. Certainly each of the people working on the project spent a LOT more time honing the skills used to create the application, but from the first lines of code to launch was only 36 hours.
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#6"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.
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.
So glad it wasn't just me thinking that. I had doubts for a second there.
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#7Just tried to click on the link and it wouldn't load. Anyone else have this issue?
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#8Just tried to click on the link and it wouldn't load. Anyone else have this issue?
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"?
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#9"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.
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.
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.
Re: My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
#10"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.
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.
Ditto.
I've always had the impression that, at least on HN, "weekend project" describes a level of "seriousness" rather than absolute time invested. It lets readers know what kind of scope and polish to expect when they click the link, and what sort of criticism would be helpful. Something like:
Startup > (Real Job) > Side Project > Weekend Project
If I click a weekend project post, I expect to see, e.g., a cute but not necessarily marketable idea, a clever technical hack that might not scale, or a cutting edge design that probably doesn't work in IE8. I expect feedback to focus on those things and not, say, funding advice.
ImageStash (since the article mentioned it ... yay, someone read my post!) took a good three months of weekends. But I thought of it as my Weekend Project because it was just something I started on a whim, and worked on sporadically when I was in the mood to code but burned out on both my Side Project and Real Job.