Ask HN: Weekend project stories

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7960652

by arsalanb • 12 years ago

22 9 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What is the shortest duration you've worked on a project? This means a complete project, from ideation to deployment (bonus if it got many users and press coverage)

There are the likes of Facebook etc, which started out as weekend on-the-spur hacks and led to huge companies. Has anybody in the HN community had such an experience?

Please mention how long it took you, what stack you used, link to the project would be appreciated, and some metrics to give us an idea how successful the project was.

commanderj• 12 years ago

A friend and I worked on a typical weekend project lately. A Font Awesome to PNG online generator (http://fa2png.io). I was great fun. It took us about 24h total from concept to live deployment. It's a flask app deployed to digital ocean.

We were on HN in 2nd place for about half a day. Got about 17.000 unique visits in the first two days, a couple of twitter mentions and now about 200-300 visits a day.

It was an awesome experience. Very satisfying because it felt kind of complete when we launched. That's not typical for a web app. Although there are always more features to add. We felt like the app is exactly doing what we planned it should.

I wrote about it in more detail here http://jannikweyrich.com/blog/2014/05/26/weekend-project-fon...

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brodney• 12 years ago

I need this basically everyday. I develop iOS apps and need pngs for icons all the time, and I'm just not that handy with photoshop yet. Please don't let this app die anytime soon!

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roschdal• 12 years ago

http://play.freeciv.org - took just 5 years.

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dully• 12 years ago

Last year I made my first iOS app as a fun side project that solved a problem I had - waking up on time. http://spinmealarm.com

I spent most of my reading week making the app, and then another 2-3 weeks polishing it. A few months later I decided to post it on Hacker News as a "Show HN". It only got a few upvotes but a TechCrunch journalist somehow saw it and decided to write a post on it. It's done pretty well in the App Store, reaching #1 in its category at one point. Nowadays it hovers in the Top 100 Utilities category.

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shlomib• 12 years ago

'Complete' (https://complete.li/) took about a week and got some press coverage (wired.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk and more..)

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ChrisNorstrom• 12 years ago

I'm a designer (and front end coder) trying to learn php & javascript.

http://Affordabl.es - 7 Days - 1and1 shared linux hosting + Wordpress + I customized the crap out of a free wordpress theme = Catalog of affordable design products with affiliate links to Amazon (has made $0 so far)

http://ResidentEvilRadio.com - 4 days - 1and1 shared linux hosting + sound manager 2 mp3 player script from codecanyon.net = jukebox of my favorite songs from my favorite game franchise.

http://TimeForZen.com - 2 weeks? (worked on and off) - sound manager 2 api + hand coded pages = meditation and nature sounds website.

Not a single one of these projects are successful. But they help you gain experience and can land you a job. Anyone applying for a gig can put "experienced in google maps api" on their resume, but putting a link to a fully working site using the Google Maps API bumps you to the front of the line.

1) Do not underestimate the value of little projects. You'll be amazed at how much experience and re-usable code they produce.

2) It's hard to put a time-frame on how long it takes because the requirements change often due to restrictions and dropped and added features. This is true for those who aren't experienced coders. We end up having to scale back projects to get them done.

3) Play perfectionist and you'll never get your projects done. It's better to cut features, finish early, and use the "ego high" of getting a project done to go back and add features. The longer you keep a project in development and unlaunched the worse it gets and the harder it is to finish. Cut half your features if you need to. Just launch quickly. Also, after launching you'll be amazed at how many "features" were not needed.

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brotchie• 12 years ago

http://howfastisthenbn.com.au/

Took about 12 hours total. Ended up with with 200k+ uniques within a few days of launch, 65k Facebook likes, ~8k Tweets, nation wide press coverage.

Didn't change government policy though :(

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iisbum• 12 years ago

A couple of friends and I built a twitter hashtag voting site for the WorldCup in about 12 hours.

We've got about 1000 votes in the first couple of weeks.

http://www.hashtagvote.me/

Site was built using Laravel, and is hosted at DigitalOcean

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NameNickHN• 12 years ago

http://www.cakedayreminder.com/

Took two or three days.

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Ask HN: Weekend project stories

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