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Comment by strictfp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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i think the idea is to put a ship date or it won't get done. A month is arbitrary of course, but long enough to make 'something' in part time, but not long enough where you can slack and eventually abandon it. it's a mind hack to keep you on "schedule" with a end goal in sight.

I think instead of thinking about 1 hour three days a week, think about spending most of your weekends on the projects. You can get a lot done in 2 weekends.

It is a fast pace but I think the idea is to not set yourself up for huge projects that don't get done; work towards small projects that you can complete in a month.

Ken Thompson wrote Unix in a month.

Wasn't that all he was doing? Also, could be mistaken, but pretty sure he was Ken Thompson.

Allegedly, it took him a month - https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/expotape.htm. But the idea had probably been growing on him for several years, while working on very similar projects.

I think this actually supports my idea of letting ideas grow on you before executing them.

Further it's a tiny subset of MULTIC project that he worked on for some time. Some of MULTIC design ended up in UNIX. One can argue UNIX's design began as far back as that where he was doing something else but pivoted in new project with weaker hardware.

> 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.

I think it's not about achieving anything of substance, it's about learning to code. Coding your own project from scratch is very hard and then effective for learning.

Slightly OT: are you actually able to do anything meaningful in a single hour? It usually takes a lot more for me to dig in into the topic, at least if there is multi-day pause between the sessions.

Well, sort of. I have established a habit of thinking about my problem during workdays and planning actions for my commute. During the commute I execute one or two planned actions.

This works really well for me, since I easily get overwhelmed if I just sit down without an action plan.

But occasionally I use longer sessions to cleanup, refactor and review my code and assess the current state of the project.

Sone days I just read up on some subject instead of coding. But there is always a risk in getting bogged down by resesearch until the point where you can think of 20 possible solutions. I then sit down and code a bit to help me decide which method would work best for my concrete case. You can always come back and reevaluate a decision if you discover problems further ahead...

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