Hello everyone! It has been a while and definitely a fun and exciting adventure over the past years since I’ve last deployed anything to this blog. While I may talk about my experiences over the past several years, especially in the software development industry, today’s post is to talk about an exciting new endeavour I’m undertaking – the #100DaysOfCode challenge. I’ve linked to the page on software.com as they have a quite extensive overview of the challenge, the rules, and tips on how to succeed – I won’t bore you with the details here – go check it out for yourself. Many of you have probably already heard it in passing, on the Internet, or possibly even tried it yourself.
The goal is to write code for one hour per day for 100 days straight. Right now is probably the best of any times to try to do a 100 day of “anything” challenge and be able to stick to it. So why not try this now?
My goal with this is to instill more of a learning culture in my day-to-day life. I’ve always been a fan of reading/learning/growing as a person and after reading Satya Nadella’s book “Hit Refresh”. In his book, he talks about transforming the Microsoft culture from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all culture – and I personally want to instill that culture into my day-to-day life.
What do I hope to learn?
As a semi-experienced software developer and having nearly 10 years of experience in the industry, there is still so much to learn. Every day, I’m learning something new and at the same time, finding I still have more to learn. Specifically though, I want to further grow my knowledge and experience about UI/UX, Cloud development/architecture, AI/ML, and general coding/development best practices. As a sneak peak: my first project will be an idle/clicker game written in Vue.js with a backend API (to be determined language) – all hosted in Azure using Docker containers (which allows for ease of testing/deployment on-prem as well to boot).
What’s the plan, Stan?
I plan to write a short post each day during the 100 day challenge. Each post may include some learnings I gained during the day, code snippets, how-tos, etc. This will keep both myself accountable towards achieving the 100 day goal and also allow others to follow along and hopefully learn a little bit too (or perhaps learn how not to do things).
I am going to tweak the challenge a little bit though – while I’ll be focusing on software development over the next 100 days, it may not be 100% coding. In the software development profession, the goal isn’t always about writing code every day. Some days may be learning days, others architecture / design days, planning/strategy, talking to users for feedback and so on.. As such, I’ll spend each day on some form of software development. I’ll post each day’s learnings/experiences on this blog to both keep myself on track and also for any others who want to follow along.
A couple additional items, I will try to learn new technologies and languages and try not to fall back on existing languages and technologies that I already know pretty well. Any time I spend writing code for work will not count towards this one hour goal – this is all personal/growth development.
What else?
Ah yes, I’ll put all of my code in my GitHub repo: https://github.com/jctierney
Most of my repos are private and the public ones are pretty old. This will also help me get more of my day-to-day side projects out into the wild vs. keeping them private all the time.
Also – while I will probably be focusing on a certain set of projects, I may also take requests from folks if you want to see how to do something, tutorials, etc. This is, hopefully, going to be a true learning experience for both you and me.
Glad to be back – and looking forward to sharing and (hopefully) talking with ya’ll over the next 100 days.
WinQuire 