7 ms·
Ask HN: You've got one month, what's your challenge?
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
- tjw 10y agoCome 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.
- andars 10y agoMake 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/ https://andars.github.io/dynamic-system/ Unsure if I can do it, but I am going to try.
- mdcox 10y agoJust 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!
- andars 10y agoThank you. Should be fixed now.
- mezod 10y agoreally cool stuff, so you started this week?
- foobarbax123 10y agoFind 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. :(
- votr 10y agoRead 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.
- dominotw 10y agowhat CIA?
- tehlike 10y agoWhere do you work?
- bloodorange 10y agoIf 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.
- slindsey 10y agoSo 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.
- fgandiya 10y agoFinish this Flask web app I've been putting off. And applying for internships.
- Matachines 10y agoMaster stoicism and Deep Work.
- ak93 10y agoThat 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!?
- dominotw 10y agoA 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.
- ak93 10y agoI have read Jiddu Krishnamurthi's work and I find it really interesting , rather helpful. I didnt know that ppl dislike his idea!?
- Matachines 10y agoI'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.
- arvinsim 10y agoFor stoicism, The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
- mezod 10y agoI'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 :-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 10y agoGet 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.
- smnscu 10y agoWow – your art (and website, by the way) looks amazing!
- egypturnash 10y agoThanks!
- votr 10y agoBecome location independent.
- amyfransz 10y agoHey, 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.
- tdy721 10y agofinish http://videopoker.academy 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 https://poker.hyprtxt.com
- elnado 10y agoUgh, 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/id1109640290 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.
- brendoncrawford 10y agoWhen 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?
- mezod 10y agogood point, the goal will vary for sure... for the bad
- Akarnani 10y agoits 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.)
- mezod 10y agoI 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
- bgroat 10y agoI'm trying to build my email list to 1,000 people.
- wuschel 10y agoFinishing a seed 2 fundraising campaign.
- pvsukale3 10y agoI 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.
- welder 10y agoThere's already a ton of job board sites, why not just use one that already exists instead of building your own?
- mezod 10y agowhat will be special about your job board site? :)
- pvsukale3 10y agoI 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 :)
- user7878 10y agoI have one if you want to use. jp.sapterc.com contact me in my email in bio.
- dyim 10y ago* 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 :)
- code_champ1 10y agoI 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
- mezod 10y agothis sounds like a cool challenge. How does it work, like your code competes against others code I understand, but how?
- code_champ1 10y agoYeah. You build bots and it competes with other bots (software bots - just code). Check this out https://www.battlecode.org/ https://www.battlecode.org/
- ak93 10y agoCompleting my indroduction with ML and doing one small challenge based on ML!
- boyter 10y agoId 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.
- 40acres 10y agoWell, I have an interview with Google on November 29, so for the past few days it's been that.
- nolite 10y agoBuild a SPA in Vue.js
- mattchamb 10y agoI 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.
- adimitrov 10y agoAfter 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.
- movedx 10y agoAll the best mate. Keep up the great work and good luck!
- bloodorange 10y agoGood luck. I hope you climb out to a pleasant place.
- egypturnash 10y agoGood luck. Depression is nasty shit that will actively fight you doing a ton of things that will get rid of it.
- noescape 10y agoKeep studying. I hope you have more success in the future.
- sn9 10y agoYou could take a self-paced MOOC and master its contents in a month.
- mezod 10y agothat 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...!
- sn9 10y agoWell 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-technical-development.html https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/guide-to-techn... [1] https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses
- mdevere 10y agoplay playstation all day for 30 days
- mezod 10y agothat sounds like the easiest suggested challenge so far :P
- tylerpachal 10y agoI'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.
- mezod 10y agothat looks like a good idea! I bet your stomach agrees :P Yeah a month should cover you on at least 5 or 10 recipes!
- n2dasun 10y agoTrying to participate in NaNoWriMo right now.
- mezod 10y agocool! Great to find that at least one person understood the question :D
- kwikiel 10y agoBuild Flask app for tracking using wifi beacons (backend)
- abstractbeliefs 10y agoFascinating, 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?
- empressplay 10y agoShip and pay the rent!
- rodolphoarruda 10y agoI 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.
- mezod 10y agoOh boy oh boy, you are one of mine! Roadtrippers for the win! Just do it! How many km do you estimate?
- rodolphoarruda 10y agoIt'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.
- gina650 10y agoMeet more cool futuristic founders, upload my 50th episode of Tomorrow's Tech podcast...and land my first sponsor! https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294 https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294
- mezod 10y agofuturistic founders?
- sixdimensional 10y agoStand 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.
- mezod 10y agoare you already working on it? or just an idea?
- arvinsim 10y agoMake a plan to pivot my career for the next few years.
- mezod 10y agofrom what to what?
- quantumhobbit 10y agoFigure 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.
- krapp 10y agoActually finish a project.
- EdSharkey 10y agoI'm writing a little block-based file system for a virtual computer for kids, I hope to have it done this month!
- cookrn 10y agoThis sounds awesome! Is there a link to your project or source code you could share?
- EdSharkey 10y agoThe 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 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.
- WorksOfBarry 10y agoI'm gonna spend a lot of the month working on my git client for IBM i. New features, documentation and feedback
- fapjacks 10y agoFinish my notification and tracking app that I haven't had time for.
- rayalez 10y ago- 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.
- atmosx 10y agoHm, 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)
- DrNuke 10y agoCan't work on my own apps recommender system atm, so taking part in the latest Kaggle competition from Santander instead.
- adolfoabegg 10y agoStart a side project a have in mind, build the MVP, validate it, get feedback.
- baccredited 10y agoIncrease your savings rate by just 5% and retire years earlier
- pieterhg 10y agoLaunch my chat app for communities http://chatbox.chat http://chatbox.chat Launch my coliving platform http://colive.co http://colive.co Make my VR game where you can catch street cats and eat ramen http://bar254.tokyo http://bar254.tokyo
- guptabot 10y agoGrow my weekly newsletter to atleast 1000 subs from the current 100: www.tinyletter.com/harshalbot
- random_coder 10y agoI'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.
- allnacho 10y agoLaunch my habit streak chrome extension
- mtw 10y agoYou 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.
- zimpenfish 10y ago> 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.
- mtw 10y agoIt 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
- zimpenfish 10y agoAgain, 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]