The archive · Business Models · Product decision · 2016–2017
1PPM turns finishing side projects into a public one-project-per-month challenge
A fork-and-pull-request challenge: ship one project a month, log it in a shared Hall of Fame — 227 HN points at launch.
1PPM challenge organizers
What it had to solve
The 1PPM Challenge, shared on Hacker News in December 2016, was built for developers, makers and creatives whose side projects stall: its stated purpose was accelerated learning, avoiding over-engineering and getting things done. The bar was deliberately low — a one-month project could be an article, an online course certificate, a GitHub repository or an open-source contribution, as long as it had a result.
How it works
In December 2016, Hacker News saw 'A one-side-project-per-month challenge': the 1PPM Challenge, one project per month for developers, makers and creatives. Its stated purpose was accelerated learning, avoiding over-engineering and getting things done — a direct answer to the pattern where ambitious side projects stall because they are too big, too polished or too open-ended to ever finish.
The design lowered the definition of success on purpose. A 1PPM project could be anything with a result — an article, an online course certificate, a GitHub project or a contribution to open source — as long as it was a one-month project. Joining meant forking the 1ppmLog repository, adding a section for your name with a description of the month's project, and merging it back with a pull request into HallOfFame.md.
Around the log sat community mechanics: a Slack channel, daily 'project of the day' picks, and an interactive Hall of Fame view that went live on 21 January 2017, with its own source released openly. The repository grew to 417 stars, 113 forks and 367 commits, and the launch discussion on Hacker News drew 227 points and 119 comments.
The idea stands on structure rather than technology: a fixed one-month box forces scope cuts, the anything-counts rule makes the goal reachable, and the pull-request Hall of Fame makes finishing a public, collective event instead of a private resolution.
Why it lands
- A one-month box is short enough to force scope cutting and finishing, yet long enough to produce something real.
- Counting any result — including an article or certificate — removed the perfection bar that made side projects feel too big to ship.
- Fork-and-pull-request onboarding made each participant's log a permanent part of a shared record rather than a personal page nobody reads.
- Slack and 'project of the day' picks converted a private habit into shared accountability with a built-in celebration.
What it did
The challenge thread drew 227 points and 119 comments on Hacker News on 30 December 2016. The repository grew to 417 stars, 113 forks and 367 commits, gained a news archive and an interactive Hall of Fame view, and collected the monthly logs of however many participants joined the fork-and-commit flow.
What you can take
Change the unit of success: if a finished article or certificate counts as a project, shipping becomes achievable — and publishing each log makes accountability and celebration automatic.
Since then
The repository remained live and maintained, with 367 commits recorded when the material was captured in 2026; the interactive Hall of Fame launched on 21 January 2017 and its source was released as an open project. The material does not record how many projects were logged in total or whether the challenge is still running — what survives is the open repository, its news archive, and the community channels that the challenge used to make one-month shipping a public practice.
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