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Almost any response was guaranteed fairly decent coverage from news.yc.

• ErrantX 17y ago
  True. I was actually looking forward to see the guy attempt the "clone". For all the meta discussion about what exactly "clone" completely entails simply the idea of trying to roll out something along the same lines in a weekend is intriguing. Could it be done? How would it go down? Would working processes change? Is there stuff to learn about the development process that speed highlights? It could make a great discussion!
  • jimbokun 17y ago
    I recently read Paul Bucheit's chapter in Founders at Work. I believe AdSense and Gmail were ideas he knocked out in an evening or otherwise in addition to his regular duties. They were not products at that point, of course. But there was enough there that, instead of theoretically defending the idea that the ideas could work in principle, he simply demonstrated them working in reality. No one could argue, then, that those ideas were impractical, and that laid the groundwork for making them into real products. I think those are good examples of "do it in a weekend" type projects. Prove something can be done, before worrying about making a real product out of it. (Of course, having all of Google's infrastructure at your disposal is nice for implementing some ideas in a weekend or less. We do have AppEngine, though.)
    • sophacles 17y ago
      I know many of my better ideas have been done over a weekend or afterhours for a week. The thing is that when its not a "complete project" these things are very easy to bang out. It's the next 6 months where the polish gets added. (side rant: and over those 6 months the frontend guys get all the oohs, ahhs, and credit, despite your having done the core work).