Minimal Viable Software Product in a weekend. Backyard deck in two weeks. Robot in 6 weeks. Canoe in 3 months. Basement renovation in 6 months. Short projects that don’t take long to do, but give you great satisfaction!
At the other end people take years to renovate and recondition cars. Gibbs from NCIS takes two seasons to build a boat. I know people that have built a plane in three years. Lots of us put lots of time into what we think are labor of love. Tell us about yours! (*)
A few questions:
What’s the longest time you took to complete a project?
What was the project you completed?
When you started how long did you think it would take?
What kept you motivated to complete it?
When you were in the pit of “this is NEVER going to happen”, what got you to make the next step?
How close is the final “completed project” to what you envisioned at the start?
(* Hey, save those unfinished projects for another thread, we all have things we are STILL working on…)
Before joining my robotics team my freshmen year, I started making a newer, larger desk for my room. I didnt finish that desk until right before kickoff of my junior year, robotics definitely pushes things around and makes you forget you even started the project :rolleyes:
Robotics wasnt the only reason it took so long but let’s just go with that
Most of my projects tend to be relatively short–I either want to get 'em done or don’t start 'em, because I’m fairly busy. I think my longest is the Fantasy FIRST drafting program–in C and in Excel, at different times–which was about 2-3 months in the evenings for most of the work, and is now primarily maintenance and/or a change in operations a couple evenings a year.
I think my longest build was SCRIW I. I first attended an off-season event in 2004, and instantly thought this was something South Carolina needed. It took until 2011 to find the right combination of people to make the event happen, despite pitching it every year or two to others on my team and elsewhere. Even then it lost a little money and ended early due to a small team count, but it was an off-season in South Carolina dangit!
There are at least two house projects that my dad still technically has not finished despite starting them at least 12 years ago.
Replacing the vanity in my mom’s bathroom. The vanity was replaced twice, but we had to take out some tile to get the first one in, and the tile was never replaced or repaired.
Adding paneling to the basement. Two walls were completed reasonably quickly, but the third wall still lacks paneling after all this time.
If I am going to work on something personal more than a year, I either make it a program and/or break it into several projects. I can go a bit longer at work - I spent three years on a project I envisioned to reprocess acoustic data for a different purpose than it had been collected, and create a database of it. Then, my department reorganized, I zigged and the project zagged. Jacob completed the project (that is, delivered the first database update) about three years later. Even with the change in personnel, the final is about 75% what I originally envisioned.
3946’s longest project was the H drive, at about 18 months. (Actually about four months spread out over 18.) This project got hung up twice. The first was during build season - we started up again over the summer because we didn’t want this thing that we knew we could do to beat us. Then, it died for lack of programmer support that summer. The thing that got us back on to it was a student asking what all this strange hardware on our 2016 practice chassis was for as we were gearing up for 2017. ~60% of what was planned early in 2015, ~90% of what was re-planned in the summer.
3946 has had a program (serial project) that has been going since the first year of the team: the air cannon. Every year sees some tweaks, and it has been rebuilt at least four times. The most recent iteration (under way, with a deadline of 31 August, our first football game) involves moving the thing up to a golf cart scale rather than a 31 inch nano tube chassis. [The nano tube chassis is now a mecanum robo-chair.] The 2017-2018 version is shown hereat a carnival parade; I’ll post pics of the 2018 iteration in the next few weeks. The 2018 version is about 1000% of what was originally envisioned (meaning that perhaps 10% of the current version is what we originally envisioned.)
Pffft, I have a similar project, pushing almost 60 years now. I’m not looking forward to the day that it will finish
On the other hand I have “adulting” down pretty much. :rolleyes:
I have a number of started projects that are 3/4 finished. I suffer from reverse friction. To do A, B needs to Happen, B needs C, C needs D. I have a few that I’m at ZX needs ZY. And ZY never gets started.
(This spills over into Need to go to Robots, where are my keys, oh next to this dirty dish, look there are other dishes, oh messed up this rag take it to the washer, oh look the yard gloves are clean put them out, oh wait …
