Having bitten this hacker bug for couple of days with me, I am just wondering how much knowledge/workout does it take to build a product and say it as a weekend project. What are the best tools/materials to consider before building a mobile app or web app?
How do you choose which tool/api for backend and frontend?<p>I am just curious whether that would really took only one weekend. Honestly, I believe when you say it as weekend product, it would definitely lower the user expectations on the product and it is my sole opinion. But when I see couple of apps, at least they look good architectures and different api integrations and still they are able to do that completely in a weekend.<p>I am open to your suggestions and no hard feelings these kind of posts.
I built the first version of Boxcar (<a href="http://boxcar.io" rel="nofollow">http://boxcar.io</a>) in a weekend -- because I was bored. Started on a Friday, submitted to Apple the following Sunday evening.<p>Since then we've grown to 1M+ users and have delivered 2B+ push notifications. We're a team of 4 now.<p>For mobile apps, your tools are basically decided for you already. Eclipse for Android, Xcode for iOS. The goal of an MVP is to keep things as stupidly simple as possible. Use external APIs if they already exist, use services like Parse, etc, to give you a leg up.<p>MVP is less about code and more about results. If you can get away with no coding at all, that's the ideal situation. :-)
I built the MVP of BugMuncher (<a href="http://bugmuncher.com" rel="nofollow">http://bugmuncher.com</a>) In 2 weeks worth of evenings (I was still working for 'the man' at the time).<p>Total time was 30 - 40 hours, so I <i>could</i> have done it in a weekend, but it would have been a hell of a weekend :)<p>I tend to take the term 'weekend project' with a pinch of salt, and usually interpret it as meaning something just built fast, and usually in spare time.
we build the MVP of Dropdock (<a href="http://getdropdock.com" rel="nofollow">http://getdropdock.com</a>) in a weekend. We are now in the process of refactoring the code and should ship the new beta version to everyone soon :)