> "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?"
> No. It took a long time.
Nearly every day I come to this site and skim past headlines resembling "Check out my weekend project!" or "Look at the awesome business idea I put together in 12 hours!!"
While I understand there can be a great sense of accomplishment to come up with an idea and pull it together in a short amount of time, I far more appreciate projects that people have dedicated months and years of their lives to.
Forget weekend whims. Dedicate yourself to an interesting project for 6 months or a year and then tell me what you've learned. You may suddenly find yourself in high enough demand that you're no longer able to spare the weekends to waste on something to show off on HN.
> "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?"
Whenever I hear that someone whipped up an impressive piece of code in a weekend or in an hour, I am skeptical.
Time passes quickly when you're doing work that you love. Since you're not tracking the time, what seemed like a brilliant 10-minute hack may have taken an hour.
My rule of thumb--based on personal observation--is to multiply by 5 to get a truer estimate of how long an impressive programming project must have taken. And when speaking to a lawyer or bureaucrat, I need to divide by 8.
A project I've been working on recently arrived at a good milestone, so I shelved it for a bit. I was very surprised to see github's 52 week participation graph showing me I had been working on it for 3 months. If someone asked me how long it took me, I very honestly would have said 1 month. Not trying to dupe anyone, not even myself, it just felt that way to me.
*Lessons learned: R is a phenomenal language for statistical analysis. Do not underestimate the power of StackOverflow to help solve complex problems. The PostgreSQL database has superb language support. Integrating third-party data sources takes longer than you think; inserting 270 million records into a database takes a lot of preparation to execute correctly.
Many of these "weekend" projects turn into long-term projects. The thing that gets launched initially helps the developer guage interest before he spends too much time on the project.
I'd have a hard time believing that 'many' of these weekend projects go on to become a long-term project.
To me at least, they seem like people taking a shotgun approach to starting projects and hoping that one of them will stick and become popular without having had to expend much effort on it. Interesting problems take more than a weekend to solve.
It's hard to really track, define (or even understand) the consumed time on innovative projects. Because time is not the essence.
When I make something really new, I don't consume time, I consume a mix of energy, enthusiasm, slowly built mind patterns and ideas, diverse epiphanies and cultural chocks, all of which took much more time to grow that the hours or days that I spent typing.
Most of my interesting software were born from a few weeks of unfocalized and undedicated thinking, a few hours (usually at nights) of precise writing in my head, followed by days or weeks (sometimes months of a 5 devs teams) of coding which, while it was hard work, seemed to be simply the transfer of an initially complete program from head to disk.
Of course this is somewhat an excessive view but it's really hard to link time (especially "working" time) to the produced software. I'm sure a lot of people here were sometimes in the impression that there were a few hours or days in their coding life that were worth years.
There's a lot to be said about condensing a project into a minimum set of requirements, delivering that, and then iterating, adding all the surplus, mite-be-cool features in the near future, and pivoting.
Six months is nice if you have the time, but what if you suddenly run out of it halfway through? What can you deliver? A broken mess or only a subset of the functionality?
It doesn't have to be said about it's done in a weekend. The emphasis should be on the MVP feature and idea of the product if that's the main draw. The weekend thing is an ego show and a distraction.
> "So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?"
> No. It took a long time.
Nearly every day I come to this site and skim past headlines resembling "Check out my weekend project!" or "Look at the awesome business idea I put together in 12 hours!!"
While I understand there can be a great sense of accomplishment to come up with an idea and pull it together in a short amount of time, I far more appreciate projects that people have dedicated months and years of their lives to.
Forget weekend whims. Dedicate yourself to an interesting project for 6 months or a year and then tell me what you've learned. You may suddenly find yourself in high enough demand that you're no longer able to spare the weekends to waste on something to show off on HN.