I'm surprised by all the negative reactions. Of course you're not going to be making anything substantial in a month (most likely). Instead, you'll learn to actually finish (or semi-finish) projects and ship them regularly.<p>This is very much like One Game a Month (<a href="http://www.onegameamonth.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.onegameamonth.com/</a>). The idea is that write, learn, ship. It's nice.<p>If you find that one of your projects takes off, or you really like it, then continue to work on it.<p>Edit: grammar
I remember quality vs. quantity story of ceramics class. [0]<p>> The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".<p>Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.<p>[0] <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...</a>
I made a resolution like this a couple years back because I had never completed any nontrivial software projects.<p>For me, it worked better to start with much smaller projects and scale upwards. I started trying to do a project a day. Initially the scope would always be too large to complete in a day, but with this quick feedback loop I learned to narrow scope. Then I proceeded to week-long, month-long, and one multi-month project.<p>It's a good method if a one month side project seems intimidatingly large to you — which was how I felt before this exercise, but no longer felt this way afterwards.
I couldn't do this. My big thing is i always want to be working on personal projects that solve problems in my life. If that ends up with cool stuff, great! But i've been burnt out too many times on making things for other people.<p>It's one thing if i set out to make a passive income, but that's work in my opinion. My side projects are open source commitments of mine, and assuming the "thing" works well and solves my problem, i'm contributing to it for years to come. Or at least until the problem is solved in another way.<p>If i'm really lucky, side project can become passive income <i>(ie, providing hosted versions, etc)</i>, but that has yet to happen, and i'm fine with that. I'm solving my own problems, which i find quite enjoyable!<p><i>(not trying to be negative, just my take on it)</i>
I think this definitely an interesting idea, I have at least 1 new idea a month but usually just talk to close friends about them and move on with life.<p>I agree that expecting to create 12 great projects next year is a stretch and odds are that 12/12 will become vaporware, however, the lessons learned and the potential (albeit small) for any one of them to actually become something makes this a worthwhile endeavor to me.<p>Actually reminds me of something I read from Antifragile[1]:<p>> Rule 4: Trial and error beats academic knowledge.<p>> Things that are antifragile love randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—that they can learn from errors. Tinkering by trial and error has traditionally played a larger role than directed science in Western invention and innovation... [2]<p>Say what you will about NNT's writing style, but the guy makes a lot of sense to me.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Ince...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324735104578120953311383448" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873247351045781209...</a>
Seems to be some people that think you can't do something in 1 months time. First of all I think the biggest thing you'll learn is how to CUT features out of something that you're building. Since you have 1 month, you really need to think about what problem you're trying to solve and cut out all the fluff that isn't necessary.<p>The second biggest thing you'll probably learn is HOW TO ship! A lot of people work on 'side projects' but no one ever really ships them. It's the hardest thing to do honestly. It helps you get over any insecurities you'll have building something. Especially when you release it to the world.<p>Building and launching is more than just building a product. It's a learning experience.
Code is useless if it is for nothing. Don't write code just to write code, write code to solve a problem you are having. If you're having 1 problem per month, then write 1 project per month. If you encounter 50 problems in one month write 50 projects in 1 month. If you encounter 0 problems in one month, write 0 projects that month.
I tried this about 2 years ago (or 3?) and man, it's a hard pace to keep up. I think I ended up with 4 projects out of the bunch before I needed a burnout break. One of the projects ended up supplying a bunch of mostly-passive income, so that was great.
One month projects sound great but with my busy schedule that would be only about 8-16 hours of butt in seat time, which isn't enough for a substantial project. I can think of some "toy" projects in that timeframe, though. And some peripheral utility projects that might be useful in the future.<p>I've been at my "main" side project for more than 5 years with no end in sight.<p>I wish I didn't have to have a day job. I'd have no issues keeping myself busy, but I'm a terrible businessman and I doubt I'd make any money.
The most important outcome for me when I did this (for 6 months) was my own webapp generating infrastructure, modules for common things with a whole lot of scripting to integrate 50-80% of all features (payments, chat, onboarding flows, landing page templates, dashboard templates, checkout flows, profile creation, etc.) depending on the app. Of course, building this infrastructure took about 4,5 months to put together and is an ongoing project, but was only possible after building 7 webapps in a row. I'm confident I could get a serious looking prototype for pretty much any webapp idea in less than a month, and depending on the app maybe less than a week.<p>(As an aside, if you're going to do this, you should also get Sketch and learn how to do graphics.)<p>I built all my infrastructure, modules, and scripts on top of Rails, and I may be biased, but I do credit my success with this to the ease, simplicity, and maturity of Rails. Popularity debates aside, is there any better framework for rapid prototyping than Rails?
I don't like this. Seems like encouraging a lot of bad starter projects that are never useful. It would be better to do code challenges/exercises for practice and learning. Like write a hashmap one month, write a linked-list (in C then in Rust) another.<p>If we want something useful, how about, contribute to a new open-source project every month. That challenge may end up with some major benefits to the community. It will also teach you how to work wth others, etc.
The comments here are borderline nonsense. I kept up a pace of releasing a working web widget (didn't charge for them, but all meant to be useful) every four days for months. Last year I released at least three dozen without burning out and honestly probably would have been happier releasing more.<p>One for-pay product a month would be pretty reasonable, as long as you set expectations well. Sound hard? "Costs $3" sets the expectations correctly.<p>The amount of scaling back on ambition here is bizarre. This isn't shooting for the moon.<p>Now, marketing, that's something that takes time. I have no words of wisdom there.
I like the idea. Sounds a good approach to get good at doing things fast. You could even significantly improve the quality of your work.<p>Anyone remembers the pottery class experiment ? They partition the group in two. One partition would be graded on the number of pottery pieces. The other partition was graded on the quality of the best piece. The result was that the first partition no only got more pieces. They also made better pieces. They just practiced more.
I've been publishing around 1 library (some small and some medium for 1 person) every other week. However, most of them are related around building front-ends using ES6[0][1] or building websites with Node.js[2][3]. I am also doing some experimentation with robotics/AI (voice/image recognition) but those are just side projects like [4], not publishing anything.<p>[0] <a href="http://superdom.site/" rel="nofollow">http://superdom.site/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/franciscop/uwork" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/franciscop/uwork</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/franciscop/loadware" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/franciscop/loadware</a><p>[3] <a href="http://github.com/franciscop/server" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/franciscop/server</a><p>[4] <a href="http://anchor.science/" rel="nofollow">http://anchor.science/</a><p>PS, I think all of those (and some more) were done within the last 2-3 months.
Excuse my ignorance, but aren't we glorifying speed here at HN? I think one project per month is way too fast to acheive anything of substance. If you're spending one hour three days a week, you'll only have 12 hours to finish a project. Even if you quadruple that, 40h isn't all that much for completing anything interesting at all. I have spent more than a year off and on on my latest side project, and it's not finished yet.<p>Having felt the pressure in the coding community myself, I've spend significant time improving my speed and I now find myself being on of the fastest coders in my company. Sure, that buys you a certain type of edge. But even if you're fast, a lot of time goes to thinking about problems, reading research and such. And someone who's constantly panicking trying to write as much code as possible will most likely find themselves digging a whole for themselves.
The valuable part of this article is to limit a startup idea to one month of initial effort. And don't continue the effort unless after a month you can gain some sort of useful validation that there is a market for your idea.<p>This also means that you will have to stick to the basic core of your idea and skip lots of details, in order to have something that can be shown after a month.<p>I've seen too many startup ideas that people started working on that weren't necessarily bad ideas, but their plan was to make an MVP, the scope of which would take a team of engineers at least a year to deliver.
I might give it a try, but on a slightly less intensive schedule--maybe one project every two months. It doesn't sound as catchy, but a bit more realistic. Best of luck with this initiative.
Just added two projects:<p>- A physics engine: <a href="https://github.com/aguaviva/Physics" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aguaviva/Physics</a><p>- A Neural network: <a href="https://github.com/aguaviva/ArtificialIntelligence" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/aguaviva/ArtificialIntelligence</a><p>The point was to learn the basics by implementing everything from scratch, I also wrote a tutorial to make sure I understood the theory.
We do something similar at work. Here's two of the monthly side projects we've come up with this fall: <a href="https://www.zombocam.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.zombocam.com</a> <a href="https://www.musicvideodispenser.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.musicvideodispenser.com</a>
I really love to see that. I believe great programmers are the one who've started countless projects from scratch on their own (of course my opinion is oversimplified here). This, 1PPM, is really what you're looking for if you want to become a great programmer. Nothing else, just that. So go for it.
Hmm… I like the idea. I think I might take it up, focusing on finishing things I’ve already started but never published, with either prototype implementations or something for which I’ve made at least some progress. I’ll get through half the year on those alone!
My "side project" (or actually just one of them) has taken +10 years and thousands of hours.<p>So I just wonder that what kind of things that produce value can you expect to create in 1 month (assuming you're putting like few hours every day) ?
Did this 2 years ago, radically changed my life: <a href="https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/" rel="nofollow">https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/</a><p>I was about to give up and get a day job.
I really like this idea. There is a terrible tendency to over engineer the things we make as developers. The practice of finishing and shipping as actually much easier said than done.<p>I'm in!
I was thinking about doing something similar this year. I settled on one project per quarter, which would let me take on things slightly more ambitious. But in a way, I like the extreme constraints set by one project per month, which will likely force someone to approach projects completely differently than they're used to.
Funny, I started the ggraph project (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13283961" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13283961</a>) pretty much exactly one month ago.
Meh.<p>This is more fun:
<a href="https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/" rel="nofollow">https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months/</a>
I'm just going to place this here:<p><a href="https://bubble.is/?ref=WDZ7KSFG" rel="nofollow">https://bubble.is/?ref=WDZ7KSFG</a>