Ask HN: You've got one month, what's your challenge? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: You've got one month, what's your challenge?

45 pointsmezod98 comments

As simple as that, you have a month, what challenge do you tackle?

Typical examples: - write a book - code a game - train to run a marathon by the end of the month

After 10 years of depression, carry over my good streak from last month and finally finish my studies so I can have a better job.

Whish me luck.

All the best mate. Keep up the great work and good luck!

Good luck. I hope you climb out to a pleasant place.

Good luck. Depression is nasty shit that will actively fight you doing a ton of things that will get rid of it.

Keep studying. I hope you have more success in the future.

Come home from work and do one productive thing, every day. I'm tired of feeling lazy but not feeling motivated to do anything but play video games and generally be a slob.

I think being more precise on what that one productive thing should be would help!

devils advocate but perhaps playing video games helps take uour mind off work and makes you more productive in the long run

* Get 100 active customer support agents on Panel Ninja [www.panelninja.com]

* Send cold emails to 1,000 potential customers

* Cut 15 seconds off my mile time

* Run 4 experiments to iterate on the cold email process

* Watch the Eagles beat the Giants, Falcons, Seahawks, and Packers :)

Get back to working on the comics pretty much every weekday. I've been bogged down in printing stuff and writing pitches and I just wanna get back to drawing some fucking comics.

Wow – your art (and website, by the way) looks amazing!

Thanks!

- Learn React(complete the video courses I've started), and use it to build the project I have in mind(discovery platform for webdev learning resources).

- Keep making progress at my fiction/comedy writing. I've been struggling with it for a long time, but I've had a few epiphanies recently, and I want to finally make it work. The goal is as always - learn to competently craft my short funny science fiction stories.

But before any of that happens, I have to take a break, cut out the caffeine, and go through several days of withdrawal. It will be miserable, but I really have to make my body rest, sleep, and recharge. I can't keep taking more and more stimulants, it's not working anymore.

Find a better place to work. Just started as a software engineer, fresh out of college. I come home and I am constantly learning, which I enjoy, go to work and introduce new ideas and am shot idea not because of my ideas but beucasue im a newbie. Over the past couple of month has eatten away at my confidence and starting to just blow it off. :(

So I'm in charge of a software development group and I have a guy who is like you. I shoot down his ideas all the time. I don't like it. I try to encourage him. We hired him because he is "constantly learning" and seems to enjoy the work and do things on his own time just like I do and just like you do.

But I shoot him down because his ideas don't fit in our group. We mostly do boring CRUD stuff for internal customers. Most things are very similar and having 7 similar projects all built in different ways with different technology is NOT maintainable. The other developers wouldn't be able to work on things that he built. Yes, the other developers should get up to speed on different technologies, but different isn't always better and I can't change them all.

Anyhow, my point. Maybe your ideas aren't shot down because you're the "newbie". Maybe they don't fit that organization. Keep learning. Keep enjoying the tech. Keep an open mind and maybe the old-timers where you are might teach you something and hopefully you can teach them something also, someday. Mostly, don't get discouraged and keep your eyes open for something better.

If you learn to think about the company's perspective on things, you can start finding ways to 'sell' ideas. Unless you can make it sound like good business, it's hard to 'sell' something to a business.

Read The Originals; in particular, the chapter on the CIA agent.

Yeah it sucks, but if you insist on the security of a larger company (my assumption), that's how it works.

what CIA?

Finding a better job isn't the only way. You can build stuff at home that you think can make money and ty to turn it into a business.

generally speaking, if you are new to a company and a young grad, i would take more time to learn how the company works for a long period of time before introducing new ideas. perhaps theres a valid reason why they do certain things that may seem awkward to you.

Where do you work?

I'm writing a little block-based file system for a virtual computer for kids, I hope to have it done this month!

This sounds awesome! Is there a link to your project or source code you could share?

The story of my KidCompy project is a little complicated. The codebase I'm working on is closed source because of ownership/partnership issues. I started work on it as a hobby in 2008, and it is distinctly a JQuery-era architecture, and it's spaghetti code.

Around two years ago, the codebase was out of control and it was getting impossible to maintain or add features. I had gone crazy with features on my server side.

I started an open source rewrite with my dream build system and good design and testing methodologies. That codebase is here:

https://github.com/clubcompy/kidcompy/tree/develop

Then, I came to my senses a little bit. The crufty JQuery codebase can be refactored, buttoned up, and turned into a MVP! I could sell subscriptions to the thing as-is, it seemed to me. It's not everything I hoped it could be, and I'm very embarrassed by the poor code quality, but there is value there. I just need to complete something and focus on selling.

So, I paused on the new open source codebase, and set about preparing my original closed source code for a commercial release. Part of that prep is removing the cloud storage for the user's virtual file system. The new MVP plan is to use the user's HTML5 Local Storage or IE6-8 UserData as their persistent storage for programs and data. That is what I'm working on right now. I just got folders working, so only files, extents, attributes, and a syscall interface remains!

I realize that the open source codebase is the only long term way to go. When my main competition is open source, I need to be as well. And, since I'll be marketing a service for kids, it will help with gaining parents' trust for me to be open with the code and the data I collect. Assuming that the MVP shows some life and gets some interest, the plan is to put the old codebase into maintenance mode and move all development to the github codebase, migrating users over to the new compy once I have everything reimplemented there.

Trying to participate in NaNoWriMo right now.

cool! Great to find that at least one person understood the question :D

Make one cool demo or write a post about something fascinating each week. Bonus level: twice a week.

This week's: https://andars.github.io/dynamic-system/

Unsure if I can do it, but I am going to try.

Just a heads up, your javascript doesn't work for me in Chrome because it's assigning to a global `history` variable. `window.history` is read-only so the js errors out. If you scope your function or rename the variable it should work. Nice challenge! Good luck!

Thank you. Should be fixed now.

really cool stuff, so you started this week?

Build Flask app for tracking using wifi beacons (backend)

Fascinating, I've done exactly this!

I based mine on a collection of ESP8266 modules talking to again, a Flask app. They'd watch for both DHCP broadcast packets and also the visibility of the device on it's own radio. It also would regularly try to ping known devices to track "sessions".

What plans do you have, what tech are you using, and where can I follow along?

Well, I have an interview with Google on November 29, so for the past few days it's been that.

You can't do any of these examples in one month. Impossible to train a marathon without injuries in one month. Can't write a good book in one month (unless you've been preparing for it in the past year). Code a game yes. But that's assuming you have a fair amount of experience

My challenge would be to clean up diet. That's doable.

> Impossible to train a marathon without injuries in one month.

I disagree - I think a lot of people could manage a slow marathon (~6-8h, basically walking pace) without more than a month of training.

It is not impossible. Yes, you can find people who can do it. By luck, you could have someone with very high determination and who has a good athletic base, even though they haven't trained recently.

Is it a challenge anyone can take? No. I don't know of any training plan made to make you run a marathon in one month. The most aggressive training plans are 12 weeks minimum (3 months), and that's for people who are already fit. For those who are not used to running, the most realistic is 26 weeks

Again, you'd have to define "run". Do you mean sub-4h? Sure, I'd agree it was wildly unlikely a normal person[1] could manage that in a month.

Personally I ran a 5h30 marathon (solo, carrying water+food, half-trail) without following a training plan at all - went from 1k to 13k to 21k to 42k in 15 weeks. By no stretch of any loose definition was I "already fit".

[1] people who don't already have a certain level of fitness.

[Edit: corrected 14 to 15 weeks after checking calendar]

Stand a project up, running on autopilot, which will make a minimum of $5k/month profit, 100% on my own without the need for any major expense other than time/effort plus simple and cost effective infrastructure.

are you already working on it? or just an idea?

Id like to get searchcode.com into the top 20,000 Alexa website ranking's. To do so id like to refresh the code results on it more quickly and add project pages.

Hm, let me think:

    * Get the AWS sysops associate certificate
    * Run at least 60km (I know it's not much - but it's okay for me)

Launch my chat app for communities http://chatbox.chat

Launch my coliving platform http://colive.co

Make my VR game where you can catch street cats and eat ramen http://bar254.tokyo

Can't work on my own apps recommender system atm, so taking part in the latest Kaggle competition from Santander instead.

I've been making a Django app for over a week because I wanted to learn doing web dev. I hope to finish it another 2-3 weeks. So far, it's been a intimidating and yet fantastic experience learning about django, http, html dom, js, jquery, css, bootstrap, sqlite, orm, templates and such.

I would compete on some crazy competition like MIT's battlecode (which usually is a month long event) ! I have worked several years, but none has given me the challenge/satisfaction of programming an AI Bot and compete with similar folks

this sounds like a cool challenge. How does it work, like your code competes against others code I understand, but how?

Yeah. You build bots and it competes with other bots (software bots - just code). Check this out https://www.battlecode.org/

Meet more cool futuristic founders, upload my 50th episode of Tomorrow's Tech podcast...and land my first sponsor!

https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294

futuristic founders?

Finish this Flask web app I've been putting off. And applying for internships.

I would work on the job board site that I have been dreaming about for months. As soon as I'm done with the exams I will go to work on that site. Target : launching MVP by the end of first week of December.

I have one if you want to use.

jp.sapterc.com

contact me in my email in bio.

what will be special about your job board site? :)

I want it to be very simple to search jobs. and You should be able to find EXACTLY what you are looking for. I know ton of others exists but it would not be a problem to implement one as a side project and see if people like it :)

There's already a ton of job board sites, why not just use one that already exists instead of building your own?

Figure out how to get a job doing data science or something else interesting instead of working on CRUD apps. I have the skills, but I need to figure out how to get my foot in the door.

You could take a self-paced MOOC and master its contents in a month.

that could be a nice idea. Because you seem to have understood the goal of my question, I'll dig deeper. I need ideas on the WHAT. Like what would you take a MOOC on? The idea is that there's so many things I might not have even thought of that you might consider...!

Well the two general things to look for would be things which you've studied in the past and wish to review or things which you've never studied.

In general, it's probably a better idea to strengthen one's foundation as they serve as the prerequisites for more advanced subjects. Google's guide to technical development [0] is a good place to start.

As far as just finding courses to take, you could just search the course catalogs of sites like Coursera, edx, Udacity, and Stanford's online offerings [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/guide-to-techn...

[1] https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses

Ugh, regardless of what we say we wish to do on this post, what I'm sure many of us lack is external motivation to do it. One app to help solve that is called Spar, developed by a friend of a friend (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spar!-get-better-at-stuff/id...). You set a goal with your friends, e.g. read a chapter every day, and put 20$ or so in the "pot". Whoever does the best at meeting the goal, gets the pot, and if you slack on your goal you lose the money.

When the incentive to finish a goal shifts from the innate satisfaction of completion to a fear of financial penalty, is it possible that the goal itself will unintentionally change in subtle ways?

its called the Token Economy Problem. tl:dr; using tokens as an external motivation mechanism transfers away from buidling internal motivation. (e.g.,$5 for each book a kid reads gets a kid to read books for $5 bills and not for love of reading/imagination/thinking. $5 tokens run out? Kid stops reading.)

good point, the goal will vary for sure... for the bad

I see what the friend of a friend did here :P Does it work? I'm not sure that kind of motivation would work for me

play playstation all day for 30 days

that sounds like the easiest suggested challenge so far :P

I'd like to enrol in a culinary arts class to learn more about cooking! I think a month would be enough time to complete some courses at one of my local colleges.

that looks like a good idea! I bet your stomach agrees :P Yeah a month should cover you on at least 5 or 10 recipes!

Grow my weekly newsletter to atleast 1000 subs from the current 100: www.tinyletter.com/harshalbot

I live in São Paulo, Brazil. I would try to get to Ushuaia by car via Chile all the way down to the Tierra del Fuego.

Oh boy oh boy, you are one of mine! Roadtrippers for the win! Just do it! How many km do you estimate?

It's hard to estimate the KMs because you are always making small detours to visit places as you go. In terms of time/duration, the roundtrip takes a full month, so very much aligned with OP's question.

I'm gonna spend a lot of the month working on my git client for IBM i.

New features, documentation and feedback

finish http://videopoker.academy

* Get a trainer version playable without sign in

* Add history and stats interface

* Work up a tutorial

* Integrate Stripe

* import style + FX from https://poker.hyprtxt.com

cool idea... would I be able to learn poker decently in one month? :P

Depends on the amount of quality hours you manage to put in

Start a side project a have in mind, build the MVP, validate it, get feedback.

Master stoicism and Deep Work.

I'm not sure this qualifies, how is this a challenge, or how can you accomplish it in 30 days? :P

The only answer that actually served the purpose of my question so far, which was to discover a new topic of interest :-)

That is really great! I am doing the same thing too. I am reading Bhagvad Gita which stresses on a similar idea and reading Deep Work by Cal Newport! Any books you wanna suggest!?

I've been reading the "primary" sources for stoicism, so Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, etc. the book the other commenter recommended is a good start and overview though.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

That one is pretty good.

I also like Jiddu Krishnamurthi a lot but ppl here seem to be not big fans of him for some reason.

I have read Jiddu Krishnamurthi's work and I find it really interesting , rather helpful. I didnt know that ppl dislike his idea!?

For stoicism, The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday.

Completing my indroduction with ML and doing one small challenge based on ML!

Become location independent.

Hey, I took the leap from my corporate job earlier this year...it can be genuinely easier than you think! (disclaimer: I run ´The Remote trip´ - see profile for link), I´m currently putting together a 'remote worker' starter kit to help people make the transition like I did, it may help you out if you're interested.

Finish my notification and tracking app that I haven't had time for.

Increase your savings rate by just 5% and retire years earlier

Launch my habit streak chrome extension

Build a SPA in Vue.js

I did a 1-day project Vue.js yesterday and I really enjoyed it. A lot of the ways they approach things make sense to me.

I'm trying to build my email list to 1,000 people.

Make a plan to pivot my career for the next few years.

from what to what?

Finishing a seed 2 fundraising campaign.

Actually finish a project.

Ship and pay the rent!

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