11–20 of 21 posts
"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.
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.
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".
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Little projects are a really nice distraction and I use them to clear my mind. I've found out early on that spending all my time developing the same thing, https://mijura.com in my case, was draining. Short projects also let me test out new libraries, hosting providers etc. That said, a weekend project can prove popular and then consume an immense amount of time. This happened to me with http://vodafail.com, which I initially created while waiting on hold for customer service.
"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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.