My weekend project: What can you really do in a weekend?
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"?
Comments
Say you have a lot of Lego.
Say you have a lot of Lego. You've been collecting it for a while, you've puttered around building a lot of things from the books and out of your head. You've got many thousands of dollars, and many thousands of hours invested in Lego.
Let's say that Friday night, you went to see the latest Harry Potter movie. Saturday morning you wake up thinking "I want to build Voldemort riding a three-headed centaur in Lego!". By the time you go to bed on Saturday, you've perpetrated this bit of brick madness.
You never had a single thought about Lego Voldemort before, much less riding a three-headed centaur. Most people would call it a weekend build, I suspect.
Maybe you use a cool joint method for the centaur's waist that you developed a few months back when you built that creepy hybrid of C3PO and an apartment building, maybe you finally found another use for that one crazy specialty part that came in a set six years back and has sat there taunting you ever since with its uselessness for anything else. You're certainly using the skills and knowledge and materials developed over years of futzing with Lego. But the time from "Voldemort! Tricephalic centaur! TO THE LEGOS!" to "posting photos on the net" is still less than forty-eight hours. And it's a break from the intricate, sprawling castle of Lego that you've been working on for the past year in fits and starts.
When you're starting from scratch, everything is hard. When you're a pro knocking something out in next to no time, you're reaping the benefits of all that time invested in practice. But it's not as if every minute you spent beforehand was a run-up to the grand goal of that weekend project you just tossed off.
In fact we can do a lot in
In fact we can do a lot in sole weekend. Including making a small website. This is not so complicated has you can use prepackaged things (CMS...), code from old projects or anything.
Even using theses, you'll require more time if this is the first time you do it.
In a weekend at best you maybe put together a few pages of content and a simple design. Maybe evbven connect to a database.
I agree that there no way you can make a fully custom project of high quality and with exclusive features. You can have a sketch, a concept maybe but that's all.
The thing is people want to impress other and want the wow factor. I can do a whole website in 15 minutes or a weekend, yeeaaahh! So what? You are the next Amazon? No You site make money? No. Your site comes with an innovative idea or inovative technology? No. You managed to create a new blog account on wordpress... Yes... I used blogger in fact. But I have my own domain name. Wow I'am impressed.
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