Skip ahead!
If you’re an active member of the tech community, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of #100DaysOfCode. It’s a coding challenge which, as you might have guessed, goes on for 100 days. The rules of the challenge are flexible, with each tailoring it to their own lifestyle. For me, I chose to aim to do an hour of either learning, coding, designing, or blog post writing every day (where possible).
Having recently passed the quarter-way mark, I’ve been doing the challenge for a month now. From the very start, I realised how helpful and fun doing the challenge can be.
Integration with the community
I’ve always been told to integrate with the community, join open source projects and such. However I didn’t know where to start. I have friends that have done some passive coding, but none that are interested enough to go to meet ups or conferences. However, after starting the challenge, I realised that twitter is the place to be. After only minutes of my first post, I received support for my journey, and with only 3 followers to my name, I was surprised to wake up in the morning with 11 retweets! I know, not much to some people, but for someone with a fresh twitter account, I was pretty pleased.
It also became a habit for me to check the latest posts with the hashtag, and comment on peoples updates just as they did mine. I found it really interesting to see what people were up to and the creations they had made.
Recently, I’ve joined a coding discord from twitter too, dubbed CodeAvengers. The idea is to work on open source projects together, as well as help others and receive advice when you need it. This was the sort of thing that I was after from the start, so I’m super exciting to get stuck in and get my hands dirty on some group projects!
Keeping Progress
It’s very easy to forget what you’ve been up to in the past month, and especially when your learning is self-guided, you can feel as though you’re not being as productive as you’d like, or you’re not making much progress.
However, with the challenge, I enjoy scrolling back through my tweets, acknowledging the things that I’ve created and thinking “actually, I’ve been pretty productive this month!”. Sometimes it’s the little boost that you need when you’re feeling low.
Motivation
Some days it’s all to easy to swerve your ambitions and just have a lazy day. I mean, we all need one sometimes, right? However before the challenge I found myself doing that a bit too often, and there was no way of accounting for it.
Even though I know that nobody will notice if I miss a day, the proof is there in the timestamps! I’ve experienced a sense of guilt when on some rare occasions the time is reaching 10pm and I haven’t touched my laptop after having a busy day. Usually, I would say “meh, I’ll do more tomorrow” but in this case I’ve motivated myself to open up my laptop, and just start something simple. In most cases, I’ll get sucked in and next thing I know it’s 2am and I’m staring at a simple if statement thinking “why are you not working!?”.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been a couple of days that I haven’t posted. But I don’t beat myself up about it - it’s okay to have days off, especially if you’re feeling particularly burnt out.
To Conclude
So, there you have it! I’d recommend this challenge to any aspiring developers that want to be more active in the community and keep themselves motivated. Check out the #100DaysOfCode website here, and dont forget to use the hashtag!
Thank you for reading!