I often read about people who set impressive goals of number of projects to complete every new year. Sometimes these numbers enter into the obscene like building 100 products in a year, or more. I have been thinking about making a similar resolution of building X number of things this year, but instead I figured that I wanted to focus on building a few great products, and focusing on growing these projects.
This year I want to focus on a few key things when building any side project.
- Learning new technologies for each new project.
- Building out the service to support users after launch (30 day promise)
- Building something that I plan on using at least once a week
- Building quickly, if I can't complete the project in less than a month, choose something else
My 30 day promise is a plan to support development, and grow a project to more people for 30 days. So once I finish a rough v1 of a product I will spend 30 days focusing on spreading the word on the project and growing a user base around the project.
The goal of this isn't to pump out thousands of small micro-services, nor many huge applications with thousands of functions. I want to build complete small services that are actually useful for myself, and maybe others.
Let me know if you have any feedback on this simple idea, or if you are doing a similar project for 2016 reach out to me!