Nights & Weekends Chronicles: Week 1 - Igniting the Spark of Ideas

About

Hey there! Welcome to my new blog series, where I'll be sharing my experiences and the progress of my product during Nights & Weekends S4. This series will be divided into six parts, with a new blog posted each week as we continue through n&w. I don't want to limit this blog by defining everything in the first part alone. Instead, I'll be posting about various aspects such as the program, my experiences, project progress, the Builspace community, and more. This approach will help me maintain consistency in writing blogs (if you know me, you're aware of my struggle with inconsistency, lol) and allow me to develop my project publicly.

Nights & Weekends is a program in which you have to build something. It can be anything (unless it's illegal). It's a 6-week-long program where buildspace will push you to put your project out in the public and they'll help you build whatever you want. At the end, you demo your product. That's not all about nights & weekends, but you can know more about it on buildspace's website.

Lecture and Lab

The kickoff, first lecture, and first lab all happened this week, and it was quite exciting. Well, I didn't apply for n&w at first, but when the results of the application were out, I saw some awesome people posting about it. As soon as I saw that, I went to buildspace's website and applied. I received my acceptance email 15 minutes before the kickoff, and this is how my hero journey started. With not much in mind, I started watching the Kickoff, and I must say Farza knows how to convince people. I was intrigued by n&w's graphics, and the kickoff was enough for me to get hooked on the program. Right after the kickoff, I received an amazing email (as always), and everyone had to choose their club. With so many amazing clubs and fantastic people in those clubs, I decided to choose Spectreseek. Apart from that, I got to meet many people on Twitter who were building incredible stuff. I feel that Nights & Weekends is a great opportunity to meet and connect with people, and I am looking forward to it.

The first lecture was "great ideas are forged, not found," and believe me, I needed it. Up until now, I had been waiting for that one idea, but not anymore. I got to understand how great products are made, what ideas constitute, and much more. Then, we received our first task, which was to write down our idea and make it public. I was a bit skeptical about this initially, but I don't regret it. I am glad that I shared my idea publicly due to the fantastic reviews I received. The second part of the task involved providing feedback on five idea slides from other individuals on various platforms. Well, I must say I did come across some amazing ideas, and all of this expanded my perspective regarding my idea.

Well, more about my idea later, but first, let's discuss the first lab. Farza reviewed some ideas directly on the stream, we voted on various concepts, and I came to realize that it's not merely a matter of an idea being good or bad, but rather if an idea is clear enough for people to comprehend. After the lab, we concluded our first week in Nights & Weekends. I didn't have much time to work on my idea this week, but I have begun designing its UI, and I will share updates as soon as I am finished.

My Idea

So, here's my idea! (No, I didn't create those graphics; I simply edited the text. All credit goes to the Buildspace team).

a website to log your technical journey

I am planning to build a website or a web app where people will be able to create their own webpage and document their technical journey on it. It will be an activity timeline-like webpage where individuals can record their achievements, failures, and various experiences. No matter how small it may be, it can be documented there. Whether it's a rejection for a program application or your first CFP acceptance, it can all be logged there.

If you like my idea, make sure to like the tweet and leave a review there 👇

Open Source

I truly love the concept of open source, and currently, I am planning to make it open source. Although I intend to create the initial prototype by myself, I would greatly appreciate having some contributors join the project. This will aid people in learning new technologies and contribute to the growth of the project.

Current progress

Currently, I am still in the ideation phase, but I have already begun designing the UI for the main page. I am experimenting with various inspirations and gradually making progress. I intend to create a GitHub repository for it, where I can initiate a project and provide details about its design.

Regarding the development phase, I don't have any knowledge currently – quite literally. I plan to build the frontend using Next + TypeScript + TailwindCSS, and the backend using NodeJS + TypeScript + ExpressJS + MongoDB. At present, I lack familiarity with Next and TypeScript; however, I am currently learning them while simultaneously working on projects utilizing these technologies. I am in the process of creating "Car Feko," and you can explore it here: https://github.com/inclinedadarsh/car-feko

I intend to make the process as public as possible, aiming to gather as many reviews as I can.

Going to be features

Here are some of the features that I can think of right now. Clearly, not all of them will be included in the first version. These are merely rough ideas representing the potential features of the project.

• Embeddable Image: Create an image that can be easily embedded in the GitHub Readme profile. Users should be able to copy a link and paste it into their profile. This image will then generate a representation of their recent achievements.

• Goals: Users will be able to set goals and add them to their journey page. This will allow their audience to see what their current goals are.

• Embeddable Timeline: A link that will enable users to embed their timeline on another website (similar to how it's done here on Hashnode?).

• Integration with Other Apps: Users will have the capability to connect with various applications, which will automatically populate events on their journey page. For instance, linking with Hashnode will add an event to their journey page each time the user publishes an article.

• Filters: This feature will enable users' audience to view specific types of events on the journey page, such as only successes or only failures, etc.

Well, those aren't all the features I've considered, but they are some of the major ones. Once again, all these features require a lot of refinement, but I'm presenting them here for you all to read and understand the direction I'm heading in.

Conclusion

Well, that's enough for now. Today is our second lecture in the second week of nights & weekends and I am pretty excited. I will be (hopefully) continuing this blog series for the next 5 weeks and I will let y'all know about my progress about my journey here.

If you like my idea, then do connect with me on my Twitter handle @inclinedadarsh and you can find me on platforms here: https://bento.me/adarsh.

Thanks for reading and see you next week 👋