"It may have taken just the weekend to build the project but it doesn't include all the initial learning."<p>By that logic, everything takes a lifetime. That's not a useful metric.<p>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.
Not only do I not care if a project was completed in a weekend...<p>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.<p>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".
People who are serial entrepreneurs or just people who like building things, get good at building things (quickly).<p>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.<p>We make the mistakes that take up all our time on previous projects and avoid them on the new ones we do.<p>We have a plan of action right from the start and know what we're going to be doing each step of the way.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Is it to call people on bullshit? I mean yeah, a lot of people are full of shit about their accomplishments, and that tendency is only encouraged by the internet. But complaining that the time spent learning the tools is not included just sounds whiny. I fail to see the benefit of posting something like this.
I'd say HN is primarily read by people who already understand that it takes a while to learn these things, so it basically IS a weekend project.<p>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.<p>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.
I built <a href="http://wwww.casePop.com" rel="nofollow">http://wwww.casePop.com</a> and <a href="http://www.seedcrafting.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.seedcrafting.com</a> in a single evening (each), but they will never truly be finished as I'm constantly wanting to add more things. But a basic, usable project was done in about 12 hours.
In general, 'weekend projects' might just something that you work on in your spare time (ie. weekends) but then again we do have things like <a href="http://nodeknockout.com/" rel="nofollow">http://nodeknockout.com/</a> and <a href="http://railsrumble.com/" rel="nofollow">http://railsrumble.com/</a>
I usually spend more time thinking about an idea than actually coding it.<p>"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.
I guess "My Freetime Project" would be more accurate but probably wouldn't get much votes.<p>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.<p>Ycombinator Weekend Audition anyone?