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A one-side-project-per-month challenge

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Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#51

Post by tener »

strictfp wrote: post #9

Excuse my ignorance, but aren't we glorifying speed here at HN? I think one project per month is way too fast to acheive anything of substance. If you're spending one hour three days a week, you'll only have 12 hours to finish a project. Even if you quadruple that, 40h isn't all that much for completing anything interesting at all. I have spent more than a year off and on on my latest side project, and it's not finis…

Slightly OT: are you actually able to do anything meaningful in a single hour? It usually takes a lot more for me to dig in into the topic, at least if there is multi-day pause between the sessions.

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#52

Post by sjs382 »

I tried this about 2 years ago (or 3?) and man, it's a hard pace to keep up. I think I ended up with 4 projects out of the bunch before I needed a burnout break. One of the projects ended up supplying a bunch of mostly-passive income, so that was great.

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#53

Post by ianai »

sjs382 wrote: post #52

I tried this about 2 years ago (or 3?) and man, it's a hard pace to keep up. I think I ended up with 4 projects out of the bunch before I needed a burnout break. One of the projects ended up supplying a bunch of mostly-passive income, so that was great.

What kind of project was it that paid out?

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#54

Post by sesteel »

untog wrote: post #50
davidwparker wrote: post #18

I'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…

I agree, I would prefer a milestone challenge where people put up demos/videos/blogs of their progress (same project or not). Maybe my first month's project is creating a site for people to share their progress towards whatever their goal is. If you think that is a good idea, vote me up :)

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#55

Post by gravypod »

kolbe wrote: post #24
gravypod wrote: post #10

Code is useless if it is for nothing. Don't write code just to write code, write code to solve a problem you are having. If you're having 1 problem per month, then write 1 project per month. If you encounter 50 problems in one month write 50 projects in 1 month. If you encounter 0 problems in one month, write 0 projects that month.

This is right when you're already at a certain level of competence. I would be pretty disappointed to hear John Carmack was taking on this challenge, but it's a good one for people who need to just put some pencil to paper to get the practice.

There's a big difference between learning how to program and starting a library/project every month. If you want to learn how to build something, which is what programming is, there is a straitforward way of learning how to do so.

Phase 1 is where you learn what programs look like. Pick any language. Learn all of the syntax and and meanings behind everything. Get to the point where you can start a project and write some code down and get a simple solution to a 1-step problem.

Phase 2 is when you pick a long term goal. Something you want to build. Maybe a game, maybe a website, maybe automate some portion of your life. After that, you write out all of the things that go into making that happen. An itemized list of absolutly every feature you want to include. Then you go to phase III

Phase 3 you break every goal into sub-goals, and those sub-goals into further subgoals so you have a tree. Stop breaking into sub-gaols when your goals are something like "Read config from file", "Grab user from database", "Render N many objects sequentially to the screen", "Wait to hear from clients wanting to connect".

Phase 4 is when you read up on how everyone else is doing all of the things you want to do. Make a huge list of mappings from sub-goals to stack overflow links on the topics.

Phase 5 every day, pick one of your sub-goals and implement a little prototype doing that sub-portion of your code.

Phase 6 reduce your tree. Go through every sub-goal and merge it into it's partent subgoal's prototype. If you get to the point where the code is messy and hard to follow abstract, optimize, and clean your solution as needed. Do not proceed to the next sub-goal until you are completely happy with how your current sub-goal looks.

Phase 7 test, test, refine, refine, clean, clean.

Doing this may take a year to get 1 project done but it will be the cleanest, most organized, and probably gest example of how you can write code. I think this one project would be worth more then 100 other projects where you "do it live".

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#56

Post by gravypod »

ebbv wrote: post #13
gravypod wrote: post #10

Code is useless if it is for nothing. Don't write code just to write code, write code to solve a problem you are having. If you're having 1 problem per month, then write 1 project per month. If you encounter 50 problems in one month write 50 projects in 1 month. If you encounter 0 problems in one month, write 0 projects that month.

> 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.

There is a different between prototype and project. If you're experimenting with features you're not making a project. If you're making a project (I hope) you're not experimenting with features. That should be done in a prototype.

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#57

Post by preordained »

joshux wrote: post #21
strictfp wrote: post #9

Excuse my ignorance, but aren't we glorifying speed here at HN? I think one project per month is way too fast to acheive anything of substance. If you're spending one hour three days a week, you'll only have 12 hours to finish a project. Even if you quadruple that, 40h isn't all that much for completing anything interesting at all. I have spent more than a year off and on on my latest side project, and it's not finis…

Ken Thompson wrote Unix in a month.

Wasn't that all he was doing? Also, could be mistaken, but pretty sure he was Ken Thompson.

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#58

Post by kolbe »

gravypod wrote: post #55
kolbe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is right when you're already at a certain level of competence. I would be pretty disappointed to hear John Carmack was taking on this challenge, but it's a good one for people who need to just put some pencil to paper to get the practice.

There's a big difference between learning how to program and starting a library/project every month. If you want to learn how to build something, which is what programming is, there is a straitforward way of learning how to do so. Phase 1 is where you learn what programs look like. Pick any language. Learn all of the syntax and and meanings behind everything. Get to the point where you can start a project and write s…

That's certainly a good way to learn, though it's by no means the one and only best way. I personally think the best way is to go to MIT and do an EECS major. But we all have our different ways of approaching education, and I respect yours as much as I respect a person who learns based on building simple applications the can relate to and engage with better because they're more interesting.

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#59

Post by halis »

The valuable part of this article is to limit a startup idea to one month of initial effort. And don't continue the effort unless after a month you can gain some sort of useful validation that there is a market for your idea.

This also means that you will have to stick to the basic core of your idea and skip lots of details, in order to have something that can be shown after a month.

I've seen too many startup ideas that people started working on that weren't necessarily bad ideas, but their plan was to make an MVP, the scope of which would take a team of engineers at least a year to deliver.

Re: A one-side-project-per-month challenge

#60

Post by neogodless »

sesteel wrote: post #54
untog wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree, I would prefer a milestone challenge where people put up demos/videos/blogs of their progress (same project or not). Maybe my first month's project is creating a site for people to share their progress towards whatever their goal is. If you think that is a good idea, vote me up :)

I have a nearly five old idea that is very similar. Eventually someone will build it (well) and it'll become very beneficial!
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