Show HN: I failed for a weekend project, here is my 5 days side project

[diegoloop]

I was wondering whether it’s possible to successfully create a weekend project and if so, with which quality. Here at HN I’ve read many stories of random people (to me they are like teachers) creating “Show HN” projects in 48 hrs which are amazingly awesome and also hit the top site of HN.

So here I’m presenting mine: http://keepandplay.com. This is actually not a weekend project, I tried for it to be, but I failed. It actually took me 5 days to have it as it is right now. So I’m still profoundly skeptic on how to realize a 48 hrs side project with the look and feel and quality I would be satisfied with.

Here is how I spent most of the time. I worked between 8 and 14 hrs a day (I’m on vacation) - Searching and choosing a keepandplay.com domain - 2 hrs.

- Keepandplay backend - 1 day

- Logo design 6 hrs. I created 18 different prototypes

- Frontend design - 3 days. Even though this site looks really simple, designing it was really hard for me. Sometimes I found myself spending more time on design than on code. I basically took screenshots from similar sites (youtube, courser, onreplaytv, soundcloud, vimeo, vine, itunes, vevo) put them on an Omnigraffle page and compared all of them. Keepandplay is a combination of Soundcloud, Vine and OnreplayTV.

- Dealing with not required but necessary settings - 6 hrs

+ It’s hard to believe, but developing a “simple” (48 hrs) website has a lot of stuff going on:

	    - Responsive design from 320x480 to 1920x1080, not forgetting portrait and landscape

	    - Favicons - which sometimes requires different logo design since the image is not big

	    - Setting some analytics tracker. i.e. register, generate code…

	    - Register site on Google SEO site

Now it’s already really late over here… I’m glad I’m finished now and I hope you guys like the outcome. If you do like it, do find it awesomely handy, then share it with all your friends and after that come back here and give some feedback. Thanks!

[ychandler]

Nice! Very useful! A blog post on how you did this and maybe a link to the repo would be a great addition if you want to frame this in the context of a weekend project.

[sharemywin]

"Sometimes I found myself spending more time on design than on code." -- it's frustrating that sometimes it can take as long to write an entire screens worth of code versus getting 1 element to line up just right.

[rco8786]

> - Logo design 6 hrs. I created 18 different prototypes > - Frontend design - 3 days

This is why people can do things in 48 hours. They just pick stock designs and go with them.

[krapp]

I choose to believe many of these "weekend hacks" took much longer than a weekend for the sake of my self esteem.

[bramm]

I need to go through my youtube watch later list and download them all for my commute.

Great tool.