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.
So imho, weekend projects are not necessarily wrapped up in a 2 day stint.
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.
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.
I don't care if a project came to someone in a dream and they wrote the code onto their bathroom mirror with their left hand, while shaving with their right hand.
I share some of the author's sentiment, but let me be clear: I'm sure some of these projects actually are finished in a weekend or less. But my view is that I don't care about that. Let's focus on the value of a project itself. How long it takes could be useful information for the purpose of critique, but doesn't need to be a central feature like "wow, you're coder superman".
We learn to use the right tools for the job, we use new light weight technologies and we build our own frameworks and scaffolding to allow us to build things quickly.
We make the mistakes that take up all our time on previous projects and avoid them on the new ones we do.
We have a plan of action right from the start and know what we're going to be doing each step of the way.
The first time you learn something, whether it's programming, building something for the web or even just trying to use a certain API - it will take a lot more time than the future iterations. However, it's this process that will allow you to get more efficient in the long run.
A weekend truly dedicated to building something in one sprint can be far more productive than weeks or months of trying to fit in occasional hours of work in our spare time. Don't forget also, that a dedicated weekend (inc Friday evening) could be a total of 54 hours (if you don't sleep), as a comparison a bootstrapped project may only have a few hours a week available - therefore the same objective will take months to complete.
If a non-technical person came along and saw it they may need clarification that no, you probably couldn't do it as well. But for most purposes it's understood that the person has been programming for longer than the weekend itself.
Also, as nickbw said it also gives an idea of the seriousness of the project rather than anything literal. A "weekend project" or so would (to me) mean something that may not last forever, but it was fun and different to try out.
"It may have taken just the weekend to build the project but it doesn't include all the initial learning." - ... and all the code snippets/classes that you have done in previous projects and might just use them again.
Still there's a lot people can do in a weekend, more so as a team. Startup Weekend (Foodspotting is alumni) and Rails Rumble come to mind.
Ycombinator Weekend Audition anyone?
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"?
