I challenged myself in a project marathon and failed

A few weeks ago, I decided to take on a challenge I called 7 Week Ship.

The concept was simple: build one project every week for seven weeks in a row.

(Spoiler alert: I didn’t complete it.)

The Motivation Behind the 7-Week Ship

I decided to take on this challenge because I felt stuck. My mind was overflowing with ideas, projects I wanted to build, and skills I needed to learn. It got to the point where I was overwhelmed and unable to focus on anything. So, I decided to create some structure by committing to a challenge: each week, I would dedicate myself entirely to one project.

This challenge isn’t just about “building” something. It’s about doing the hardest part—starting. It’s about embracing the excitement of creating within a clear timeline, staying focused, and enjoying the thrill of the process.

What I built

Over the course of these seven weeks, I built a CSS framework called NourCSS and created a landing page for my theme and component library.

While working on these projects, I primarily used Sass and Nuxt but also explored new technologies like Hugging Face, Hugging Face Transformers, and Gradio.

I gained a deeper understanding of state-of-the-art LLMs (Large Language Models) and how to use them locally, which was both fascinating and rewarding.

Overall, it was an exciting journey and an incredibly enriching learning experience.

What I learned (Alternative title “Why I failed”)

The reasons I failed this project are pretty straightforward: poor project management, choosing projects that couldn’t realistically be completed in a week, and a lack of consistent commitment and dedicated time.

Here’s what I learned from this experience:

• Plan Ahead with Clear Goals: Define what success looks like for each project and break it down into achievable steps.
• Set Realistic Expectations: Choose projects that are challenging yet manageable within the given timeframe.
• Prioritize Time Management: Allocate dedicated time slots each day to work on the project without distractions.
• Embrace Flexibility: Be prepared to adjust your approach if things aren’t going as planned.

A win is a win

The truth is, I don’t consider the challenge a failure at all. It helped me rediscover my love for coding and building things. Most importantly, it pushed me to tackle the hardest part of any project: getting started.

One of the projects I’ve been meaning to work on for a while—a Nuxt component and theme library called Nourkit—now has a strong foundation. It’s a skeleton I can keep refining into a sleek, functional app that’s both useful and exciting to develop.

This challenge also nudged me to take another big step: I finally joined X and started interacting with the indie hacker community. Even though it’s still in small steps, connecting with like-minded creators has been inspiring and motivating.

In the end, the challenge wasn’t just about building projects; it was about building momentum, connections, and a renewed sense of purpose.