| Article text: 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"? |