In a month!?

25 October 2011

Years ago, I participated in something called Nanowrimo: National Novel Writing Month. If you've never done it, I can tell you, it's hilarous. You take the month of November, and in those 30 days, you write a book, start to finish. It will be bad. It will need a lot of work. It may not even be salvagable. I have never picked up the book I wrote that month and thought, yeah, I can do something with this. It got shut in a drawer and eventually tossed.

So why do it?

Get all the bad out

There's a theory, amongst writers, that you have to write so many bad words before you get to the good ones. One author figured that you had to write a million words of really bad prose before you started churning out the truly awesome stuff. Nanowrimo was a way to get through a huge chunk of those words rather quickly.

It seems a bit silly, but there's some wisdom to it. You accept that, yes, you will write crap, and that you're going to have to write quite a bit of it. It takes dedication to write a million words of prose. Even if you write a the frantic Nanowrimo pace of 1667 words a day with no vacations, you're still going to be writing for almost two years before you run out of crap. How can you not be better off after two years of constant practice?

Community

The community is amazing. I mean that. I don't do Nanowrimo anymore, but I still read the forums. These people are experts at blowing off steam, calming each other down, coming up with new ideas, and helping each other with research. They have a whole forum dedicated to finding an expert in whatever field you need for your crap book.

Take the idea for a test ride

We've all had those ideas, those ones that seem very close to good. They're the ideas we return to when we're in our cups. All of our friends have heard the muddled pitch, and have patiently sat through it until they can find something to distract us with.

This is a chance to take an idea for a drive around the block without having to commit too much to it. Maybe you'll finally find that fatal flaw in it and abandon it for better ideas. Or, maybe you'll take its flaws, smooth them out, and actually find something worth working on.

Learning

You learn a lot about yourself when you try to do something epic in a month. You learn what you don't know, for one. When there's no deadline, it can be easy to spend months working on a very simple task. When the loss of three days is catastrophic, you figure out what you have to get smart on, fast.

You also learn how tolerant you are to losing those pockets of free time. Did you notice that you were watching less TV? Happy about it? Or were you stealing time from things like laundry or dishes or those pesky family things that live with you?

So... why am I talking about this?

This would be awesome as a coding challenge.

Sure, sure, I know that day-long, week-long, and month-long coding challenges abound, but most of these focus on groups of coders working on a set of features. Nanowrimo is about writing a complete novel in one month, in only the spare time afforded to you. A coding version of that would be about getting a complete project out in thirty days. You start with nothing but a few napkin sketches, and end with a real, live site. And you do it alone.

Why alone? Because most of our personal projects wallow as we wait for some slack-ass friend to finally get around to helping us out, or we convince ourselves that the fantastic designer we get coffee with will join us, if we just make our pitch perfect enough. Guess what? Ain't gonna happen, people. Most of our projects will only be gotten off of the ground alone, only to be joined later by friends and collegues.

So, you would have a month to finally get off your butt and do that cool thing that you've really wanted to do.

Rules

• You cannot code, comp, or schema before the month starts.
• You cannot set up your server.
• You cannot buy your domain name. No, no one wants it. I'm sure. Chill out.
• Any language is fine.
• It cannot be something you can do at work.
• This cannot be a project you've already started work on. If it is, toss all that code. ALL OF IT. Cheater.

How to figure out if you won

• Is your server up and running?
• Is the site out of debug mode?
• Is your code tested?
• Does the site actually work?

That last one is sort of important.

I think I'm going to take this idea for a test run by actually making a site for it in November. Anyone else care to join me?