So, Curtis, what are you going to do as soon as you graduate from University?

Are you going to travel the world? Are you going to get a job? What are you going to do, Curtis?

I have a number of different plans, of course- all of the standards. I’d like to travel, I’d like to get a job and finally move out with my girlfriend, I’d like to start my own company, I’m sure you’ve heard it all.

But, here’s the thing- this may be my last opportunity to have a big block of free time. Nobody in the industry has the opportunity to just take 6 months off and do something interesting, do they? That’s right.

So, maybe I’ll just take a big chunk of time off. Nothing. For 6 months. That’s a long time, isn’t it? Nothing for 6 whole months. It almost seems painful to think of doing nothing for that long.

Well, the first month is a trip to Egypt with Kristen. There’s the adventure portion of the ride. What do I do for the other 5 months, aside from drive my parents absolutely bonkers?

This idea is still in it’s infancy, but it’s borne from a talk from Will Wright that I just recently went to (more on that later!). He had a specific anecdote- there was a pottery making class, he said, that split into two groups. One group was marked in terms of how nicely they could produce one single pot. The other group was marked in terms of how many pots they were able to produce over the course of the semester.

The interesting thing was that the quality of the pots produced by the second group was much higher than the quality of the pots produced by the first group. The process of doing things again and again allowed the group to develop a number of different ideas, learn what worked and what didn’t work, and in the end produce a high quality product.

As a segue, throughout University, I’ve had a number of ideas- little bits of software here and there that I’d love to write if I could only find the time. I’m great at writing software if I can dedicate a full 8-hour chunk of my day to producing something useful- but I just can’t get into development when it occurs in fits-and-starts.

Here’s the idea: I will produce one new project every week. One project per week, every week, design, development, and testing, for 5 months. Some of the projects will suck, or fail. Some of them might not. What goes into the projects will be the bare minimum feature set required to implement each project.

At the end, I hope to be a better coder, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll have a couple projects that are actually popular with people- projects that I could pursue further. It’s always easier to get coding when you have a codebase to work with.

Heck, it worked for Jonathan Coulton.

What do you think?

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