Keep each other motivated on projects: #devchallenge

Today I received an invoice for a domain I registered five years ago.

Back then, I’ve been doing my masters in computer science and around this time of the year, I had a chat with a new friend of mine regarding our lack of persistence to finish possible side projects.

Along the course of our conversation we both realized that teaming up on something could help us stay motivated, so we made a plan:

The Android Challenge

We both committed on building 12 Android apps during the course of 2015, each month another app.
Initially, there were just the two of us, but pretty soon more friends of ours joined our little project.
There were pretty tough times, especially during finals, but most of the time the whole project has been one thing: fun!

We always had a good laugh and learned tons of new stuff while building our projects, which made the whole thing pretty awesome.
Fast-forward to five years later, I’m on a trip down memory-lane after reading the invoice for our domain.

On to new shores! #devchallenge

So, what’s all the fuzz about?
All the great memories about our little project made me wonder if this could also work on a larger scale, so I created the #devchallenge repo.

The rules are similar to ours:

1. Have fun
2. Respect each other
3. One month timebox per project
4. Choose your own stack
5. Projects are selected by majority vote
6. Write about it! Share your stories!

How will this work?

I will publish an initial project on January 1st, 2020 to get the whole thing started.
But this thread could (and should) be used to collect new ideas.

So if you want to:

• suggest a project idea: simply comment in this thread
• upvote an idea: like the post

At the end of a month, the most liked post will be selected for the next project.

Topics are not limited to a particular kind of application (web, mobile, desktop etc.). If you’re not experience with a particular kind of application, join a team to learn about it!
But please keep the one month timebox in mind when brainstorming new ideas ;)

How do we get started?

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your project folder below the current months folder, e.g. 01/my_project_name for the January project
3. At the end of the month, create a PR to merge your project into upstream

Team, anyone?

Of course things will be easier if you form a team with experienced developers.
But to be honest, one of the things I liked the most about our approach is the fact that I didn’t know anything about Android development when I picked up the challenge.
But during each project I learned pretty much about Android (and software development in general), because my teammate taught me quite a lot of new things.

So please keep in mind that this is not a race! Teams should be formed regardless of skill levels, age, gender etc.
Let’s embrace diversity and focus on our main goals: fun and learning from each other

I’m excited ...

... to see if this works out!

So long

Simon