Last year I geared up to build 12 side projects in 12 months. I grossly over estimated my available time and my ever changing work situation. The apps I tried to build were complete applications that in retrospect would have taken a month of fulltime work to build. This year 2 things have changed, firstly 12 apps of 2012 sounds so much better, secondly I’m building 12 features or demos rather than applications.

They will most likely be small applications like tweetCMS. I’m curently interested in some less practical areas of computer science like Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms. I’d like to have a go at building my own RSS Feed reader that is a bit cleverer than most. Some months I might just build additional functionality onto this project and call it an app.

A while ago I built and advertising network in an afternoon, it would be good to go back and build a decent backend for that with statistics and some more advanced features.

The most important thing about this annual slog through side projects is keeping everything timeboxed to at most 20 hours work. In reality I don’t have more than 10 or 20 hours a month spare, so to deliver a project every month I need to plan effectively and be realistic.

So on the 1st of everymonth I will post a specification of the app, what I intend to achieve, technologies I’m using, expected outcomes. Twoards the end of he month I’ll publish the app and a quicj synopsis of trials, tribulations and possibly jubilation at actually shipping it.

Want to join in? I’ll also be using the #12in2012 hashtag on twitter if you want to follow along or block it out.