Personally I'd be happy with one project a year or even a decade really ;-)
Do you have 3 lives? You can't afford that if you want to build stuff. We actually have 15 years (on average) of useful life from 20 to 70 if you're lucky.
A one-side-project-per-month challenge
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#42I couldn't do this. My big thing is i always want to be working on personal projects that solve problems in my life. If that ends up with cool stuff, great! But i've been burnt out too many times on making things for other people. It's one thing if i set out to make a passive income, but that's work in my opinion. My side projects are open source commitments of mine, and assuming the "thing" works well and solves my…
I like this idea, I've got a handful of side project ideas that I always go back and forth on having/losing steam on and I end up never finishing them.
I also go back and forth on whether my side project should be open sourced or not. Why did you decide to open source all of your personal projects? What if it became something great that you later find out could be sold for extra income, would you regret open-sourcing?
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't write code just to write code, write code to solve a problem you are having. What if the problem I'm having is that I don't know Haskell? It's totally fine to code exercises that don't serve any useful purpose. Just like it's fine for me to make terrible songs on the guitar that nobody would ever want to hear.
My take with the analogy here is that you're still playing the guitar to make songs (an end product), instead of just learning how to pluck strings for the sake of plucking strings and testing how different strings of different materials feel for the heck of it.
But that latter thing is still something guitarists do. You might throw some new strings on and noodle around for a day with no particular purpose in mind.
Likewise it's fine to write code with no bigger goal other than to play with a library or a language.
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still haven't finished my Game a Month project for January 2016...
I did 3 months in 2014 (I think?) then got stuck. It wasn't so much finding the time that was the issue for me, but deciding on a game I'd like to build. Although that's pretty much the story of my side projects, I spend more time procastinating over what to build rather than building it.
I keep getting distracted by turning parts of my side projects into their own side projects.
The game I was working on (basic Berzerk clone) was simple enough, but once I decided I needed to use Lua (why? I don't know, I just did) and rewrite the ECS (it's still terrible) and have a vector-based camera for 2D scrolling, which Berzerk never even had (and rewrite the vector class, of course, even though it already worked) and I spent a week writing a state machine for basic enemy AI, implementing it, wondering if an ad-hoc possibly Turing complete pseudolanguage implemented in std::vector was really the correct solution, hating it even though it worked despite being an affront to programming, and deleting it, along with all of the game states that used it, and starting over from scratch, I realized I wasn't actually making a game anymore, so I gave up.
And by "gave up" I mean I'm working on the nth complete rewrite right now. The ironic thing is, it could have been done by the deadline - most of the gameplay was already there, if I'd just focused on the forest and not the trees.
But in my defense, the camera is pretty darn smooth, and I seem to have gotten a lot of useful code out of the effort, but not an actual game yet.
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#45I don't like this. Seems like encouraging a lot of bad starter projects that are never useful. It would be better to do code challenges/exercises for practice and learning. Like write a hashmap one month, write a linked-list (in C then in Rust) another.
If we want something useful, how about, contribute to a new open-source project every month. That challenge may end up with some major benefits to the community. It will also teach you how to work wth others, etc.
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#46I'm surprised by all the negative reactions. Of course you're not going to be making anything substantial in a month (most likely). Instead, you'll learn to actually finish (or semi-finish) projects and ship them regularly. This is very much like One Game a Month ( http://www.onegameamonth.com/ ). The idea is that write, learn, ship. It's nice. If you find that one of your projects takes off, or you really like it, t…
The headline should be "The One Project Per Month Challenge." For me, the term "Side-Project" implies that the goal is to generate revenue, which is not the goal of this challenge.
(Edit: phrasing)
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#47I like the idea. Sounds a good approach to get good at doing things fast. You could even significantly improve the quality of your work.
Anyone remembers the pottery class experiment ? They partition the group in two. One partition would be graded on the number of pottery pieces. The other partition was graded on the quality of the best piece. The result was that the first partition no only got more pieces. They also made better pieces. They just practiced more.
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#48I don't like this. Seems like encouraging a lot of bad starter projects that are never useful. It would be better to do code challenges/exercises for practice and learning. Like write a hashmap one month, write a linked-list (in C then in Rust) another. If we want something useful, how about, contribute to a new open-source project every month. That challenge may end up with some major benefits to the community. It w…
I added to the 1PPM README file, that a contribution to an open source project is a perfectly valid and highly encouraged project. Thanks for your remark.
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#49I couldn't do this. My big thing is i always want to be working on personal projects that solve problems in my life. If that ends up with cool stuff, great! But i've been burnt out too many times on making things for other people. It's one thing if i set out to make a passive income, but that's work in my opinion. My side projects are open source commitments of mine, and assuming the "thing" works well and solves my…
I like this idea, I've got a handful of side project ideas that I always go back and forth on having/losing steam on and I end up never finishing them. I also go back and forth on whether my side project should be open sourced or not. Why did you decide to open source all of your personal projects? What if it became something great that you later find out could be sold for extra income, would you regret open-sourcing…
> Why did you decide to open source all of your personal projects? What if it became something great that you later find out could be sold for extra income, would you regret open-sourcing?
I think that's a decision to be based off of what it is. If that's a concern, and if open source has limited inherent value to you or the project, perhaps it shouldn't be.
For me, i highly doubt my currently projects will make any money. Primarily home automation, and home cloud-lite stuff, Storage, etc. Nothing ground breaking, and where it might be "ground breaking" (though it's not), i specifically strive to not have it be ground breaking - a pillar of my work lately has been simplicity, ease of use and ease of maintenance - being side projects and all, i don't want anything i write to confuse me in two years.
So yea, i have no concerns about it being open source - and so i default to OSS. If it gains any adoption, i get contributors, testers, UX requesters, etc, all things i want. So OSS is purely a boon for me, in these cases.
edit: Plus, i like being able to add a trail of work on my resume/site/etc that i'm proud of. For few side projects that i have left closed source, i split off as much code as i could making them into OSS libraries and such. Even if the core of it can't be OSS, some of it can i'm sure :)
Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge
#50I'm surprised by all the negative reactions. Of course you're not going to be making anything substantial in a month (most likely). Instead, you'll learn to actually finish (or semi-finish) projects and ship them regularly. This is very much like One Game a Month ( http://www.onegameamonth.com/ ). The idea is that write, learn, ship. It's nice. If you find that one of your projects takes off, or you really like it, t…
> If you find that one of your projects takes off, or you really like it, then continue to work on it.
I think this is the thing. It's a slightly weird set of incentives for you to create a new project every month, irrespective of whether last month's worked out or not.
I'd instead describe it as "12 months of ruthlessness". Start a project at the beginning of the month. Has it gotten anywhere by the end of the month? Do you have a result (and that can be an open sourced module as much as it can be a user-facing product)? If not, shut it down, start something fresh on month 2. But if you do have a result at the end of the month, keep at it.