6 ms·

Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend?

6 points by umut 14y ago

Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend for no good reason? Just out of curiosity...

voxx 14y ago
attention. notoriety. ad revenue. it's fun. boredom. any of the above.
victorbstan 14y ago
It's called 'playing'.
ggalan 14y ago
who's to judge 'useless'
- umut 14y ago
  No one, actually it's the character limit for the title. :) I didnt mean to be hostile or disrespectful. I just believe that they need some more time in the evolution process, make the app better and then ask for feedback, which at that time more likely to produce more meaningful feedback from the community...
tiffani 14y ago
Learning.
nilium 14y ago
Why not? If it's fun and harms no one, I don't see why one shouldn't create "small useless apps" in her spare time. If anything, you should pat folks like that on the back for trying new things (assuming they're new to the person making them).
aaronpk 14y ago
This is not new behavior, people have made small useless apps on the weekend for a long time. This is, however, the first time it's been possible to get such wide visibility of these kinds of projects thanks to HN and the rest of the Internet.
revorad 14y ago
You said it - just out of curiosity Try it sometime. It's fun.
- umut 14y ago
  I am actually, the issue here is not that i don't like these projects, but i cannot give meaningful feedback on them... When you develop any sufficiently big project, most of the assumptions and specifications change over time. This is evolution. And what i criticise is, whether it is a good idea to show a half-baked app and make people think that it is useless. I believe waiting a bit more and developing the app and then posting it makes more sense. For all the learning practices, i agree it is very valuable experience, but just let them evolve...
bmelton 14y ago
Practice? To scratch an itch? One could argue that Twitter is a 'useless' app that realistically could have been prototyped over a weekend. I'm not arguing whether it is or isn't, but it's certainly popular. My favorite 'weekend' app of the moment is Word Wars[1], which happened to be built during a hackathon. I'm putting the finishing touches on "By A Bus", which is a source code escrow service activated by a dead man's switch that I started tinkering with yesterday, after reading this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761 Why am I doing it? I thought it would be a fairly easy thing that could be knocked out pretty quickly that would solve the problem of what happens to source code when their developers die. Source code escrow services are complicated and expensive, but with "By A Bus", you can just choose to escrow your Github-hosted source code so that if you die, all (or some of) your private repositories can be open sourced, or 'willed' to other open source contributors to take care of. It is useless? Well, now it certainly is, and even after it launches, it might still be except to a small percentage of developers. I'll have learned a little more about the dotcloud infrastructure when it's done, and learned the GitHub v3 REST API, which I'd never touched before. This kind of experience isn't exactly groundbreaking, but the more little things I can touch, the better off overall I am to be able to handle new things that I haven't seen before, or figure out how 'thing a' will interact with 'thing b'. Most importantly though, small things can grow to be bigger things. Twitter wasn't exactly the hyper-mega trending analytics engine it is today when it first launched, but it grew into that as its creators realized how people were using it. Google started out as a search engine, and is now one of the biggest companies in the world. The best ideas start from small beginnings, and I'd much rather have a small project that a few hundred people like than a Facebook-sized project that nobody does, and I'll have wasted a lot less time in getting there. [1] - http://wordwars.clay.io http://wordwars.clay.io
- umut 14y ago
  Don't get me wrong, the title is put together because of the character limit. I truly appreciate and like the idea of putting together bootstrapped apps, i work for one of those ideas going into maturity, but then don't you think you lose one silver bullet you have. Other people's feedback is important, especially on HN, so i was thinking of using it wisely and show them a developed feature-set, at least some level of maturity. I am sure, twitter's thing is not the idea of micro blogging and following and such, but rather the feature set they have put together and served and scaled for the long time they are alive. Otherwise competition would crush them, remember Google Buzz...
dylanhassinger 14y ago
cuz there's good TV on during the week?
far-I 14y ago
nothing is useless.
umut 14y ago
well, my intention was asking why such small things, i think mvp is overrated, people can put together a meaningful set of features and produce a real product, probably not in a weekend but in a month or two or six... then it makes more sense for the audience to check the featureset and give more meaningful feedback. That's my opinion at least. Don't get me wrong, i appreciate and support all the efforts by these bright people, but...

6 points by umut 14y ago

Why do people keep creating small useless apps in the weekend for no good reason? Just out of curiosity...

voxx 14y ago

attention. notoriety. ad revenue. it's fun. boredom. any of the above.

victorbstan 14y ago

It's called 'playing'.

ggalan 14y ago

who's to judge 'useless'

umut 14y ago
No one, actually it's the character limit for the title. :) I didnt mean to be hostile or disrespectful. I just believe that they need some more time in the evolution process, make the app better and then ask for feedback, which at that time more likely to produce more meaningful feedback from the community...

tiffani 14y ago

Learning.

nilium 14y ago

Why not? If it's fun and harms no one, I don't see why one shouldn't create "small useless apps" in her spare time. If anything, you should pat folks like that on the back for trying new things (assuming they're new to the person making them).

aaronpk 14y ago

This is not new behavior, people have made small useless apps on the weekend for a long time. This is, however, the first time it's been possible to get such wide visibility of these kinds of projects thanks to HN and the rest of the Internet.

revorad 14y ago

You said it - just out of curiosity Try it sometime. It's fun.

umut 14y ago
I am actually, the issue here is not that i don't like these projects, but i cannot give meaningful feedback on them... When you develop any sufficiently big project, most of the assumptions and specifications change over time. This is evolution. And what i criticise is, whether it is a good idea to show a half-baked app and make people think that it is useless. I believe waiting a bit more and developing the app and then posting it makes more sense. For all the learning practices, i agree it is very valuable experience, but just let them evolve...

bmelton 14y ago

Practice? To scratch an itch? One could argue that Twitter is a 'useless' app that realistically could have been prototyped over a weekend. I'm not arguing whether it is or isn't, but it's certainly popular. My favorite 'weekend' app of the moment is Word Wars[1], which happened to be built during a hackathon. I'm putting the finishing touches on "By A Bus", which is a source code escrow service activated by a dead man's switch that I started tinkering with yesterday, after reading this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990761 Why am I doing it? I thought it would be a fairly easy thing that could be knocked out pretty quickly that would solve the problem of what happens to source code when their developers die. Source code escrow services are complicated and expensive, but with "By A Bus", you can just choose to escrow your Github-hosted source code so that if you die, all (or some of) your private repositories can be open sourced, or 'willed' to other open source contributors to take care of. It is useless? Well, now it certainly is, and even after it launches, it might still be except to a small percentage of developers. I'll have learned a little more about the dotcloud infrastructure when it's done, and learned the GitHub v3 REST API, which I'd never touched before. This kind of experience isn't exactly groundbreaking, but the more little things I can touch, the better off overall I am to be able to handle new things that I haven't seen before, or figure out how 'thing a' will interact with 'thing b'. Most importantly though, small things can grow to be bigger things. Twitter wasn't exactly the hyper-mega trending analytics engine it is today when it first launched, but it grew into that as its creators realized how people were using it. Google started out as a search engine, and is now one of the biggest companies in the world. The best ideas start from small beginnings, and I'd much rather have a small project that a few hundred people like than a Facebook-sized project that nobody does, and I'll have wasted a lot less time in getting there. [1] - http://wordwars.clay.io http://wordwars.clay.io

umut 14y ago
Don't get me wrong, the title is put together because of the character limit. I truly appreciate and like the idea of putting together bootstrapped apps, i work for one of those ideas going into maturity, but then don't you think you lose one silver bullet you have. Other people's feedback is important, especially on HN, so i was thinking of using it wisely and show them a developed feature-set, at least some level of maturity. I am sure, twitter's thing is not the idea of micro blogging and following and such, but rather the feature set they have put together and served and scaled for the long time they are alive. Otherwise competition would crush them, remember Google Buzz...

dylanhassinger 14y ago

cuz there's good TV on during the week?

far-I 14y ago

nothing is useless.

umut 14y ago

well, my intention was asking why such small things, i think mvp is overrated, people can put together a meaningful set of features and produce a real product, probably not in a weekend but in a month or two or six... then it makes more sense for the audience to check the featureset and give more meaningful feedback. That's my opinion at least. Don't get me wrong, i appreciate and support all the efforts by these bright people, but...