[wccrawford]

"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.

[div]

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.

[nickbw]

Ditto.

I've always had the impression that, at least on HN, "weekend project" describes a level of "seriousness" rather than absolute time invested. It lets readers know what kind of scope and polish to expect when they click the link, and what sort of criticism would be helpful. Something like:

Startup > (Real Job) > Side Project > Weekend Project

If I click a weekend project post, I expect to see, e.g., a cute but not necessarily marketable idea, a clever technical hack that might not scale, or a cutting edge design that probably doesn't work in IE8. I expect feedback to focus on those things and not, say, funding advice.

ImageStash (since the article mentioned it ... yay, someone read my post!) took a good three months of weekends. But I thought of it as my Weekend Project because it was just something I started on a whim, and worked on sporadically when I was in the mood to code but burned out on both my Side Project and Real Job.

[misuse-permit]

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.

[mirkules]

Yeah, I'll second that. I was pretty intimidated knowing that people on HN are so much more efficient than me. That in turn motivated me, so I'm kind of disappointed that these didn't actually take 2 days of work. Still, some weekend projects are pretty motivating regardless of how long they took.

[tomelders]

So glad it wasn't just me thinking that. I had doubts for a second there.

[abrimo]

I thought it actually did take a weekend because when I say 'weekend project' I literally mean that I spent one weekend on it and then it was working. I posted some time ago about http://bemyfirstcustomer.com which I thought of and then coded in a weekend.

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.

[bradleyjoyce]

I agree... including time spent learning doesn't make much sense to me, though I agree with the writer's point that the "real" time is much greater than a weekend.

We built v0.1 of http://queued.at in 36 hours of coding at Dallas startup weekend. Certainly each of the people working on the project spent a LOT more time honing the skills used to create the application, but from the first lines of code to launch was only 36 hours.

[ristretto]

This. It's a fancier term for a "side project built on spare time".