So certain parts of the world already entered the year 2017 (this system doesn’t sound that great, but I will leave this discussion for another occasion) and we, here in Europe, are making the preparations to start the new year in a few hours.
I am not found of those traditional new year resolutions that everyone does, they seem always destined to fail. But, yesterday I found a challenge on HackerNews that is very interesting and looks like a great push to be more productive during the whole year.
This post explains it a little better, but in brief, everyone that tries to accomplish the “1ppm Challenge” must build and ship a different project every month during the next year. For it to work out, in that restricted time-frame, the projects must have a clear objective and focus on solving a well defined problem. They also must cut all the clutter and be a MVP (Minimum viable product) since we only have +- 4 weeks for each one.
On the original challenge the projects can be anything, but for me I will restrict it to software projects (at least 10 in 12). My goal with this is to improve me skills in shipping new products and to focus on what matters the most in a given moment. I’m realistic about the challenge and having a 100% success rate will be hard, so a the end of the year I will evaluate my performance this simple way: number_of_finished_projects/12.
By number_of_finished_projects I mean every project that meets all the goals defined for it. Since I don’t have yet 12 good ideas I really want to work on during the next year, the project for each month will be posted in a new post before the beginning of every month and the challenge log will be updated.
So lets see what is the score I achieve at the end of the year. To get things started here is the description of the project for the next month:
Audio and video capture monitor
Description: This project aim is to let people know when their computers camera and microphone are being used by any program. This way every time a program starts to use this devices the users gets an alert. For now it will be Linux only.
Goals:
- Must be written using Rust
- Must detect when the cam or the micro is active (being used)
- Must alert the user
- Provide a log for all activity (optional)
So, I’m looking forward to know how this challenge will play out. Tomorrow it is time to start. Hope for a better 2017 for you all.