My 100 days of code challenge recap from 2018
At the beginning of last year, I wanted to start a project and get back into coding. I constantly have ideas and want to build things, but it’s very hard to go at projects alone. I have been hearing about these 100-day challenges for the past few years and thought maybe this was a good way to approach a project. I love reading about productivity, project management, and organization and thought this would be a good experiment.
I started the 100daysofcode challenge on 12/31/17. Overall, I thought it was a success, but I never got the chance to publish my results. I tweeted daily about my progress and also tried to encourage others in their quest for #100daysofcode.
I woke up every morning 6 am (about an hour before I usually do) and coded for an hour before work. It took discipline as there were some mornings which I didn’t have any motivation whatsoever, but I had to force myself out of bed to get it done. It’s hard to stick to something for that long and it’s best to have plans up front — I ran into issues a few mornings where I had nothing to check-in because I was reading or learning about different things. The streak in Github is what motivated me the most, I actually checked in code for 90 days straight.
I ended up writing a #vuejs app that recreates a daily standup web application, the website is no longer live — but it helped to learn some different technologies pretty quickly. The source code is available on github. I used a Trello Board to organize all my thoughts and tried to tackle one card each day.
What I learned:
Before starting a project, it’s best to plan before starting any code.
“Measure Twice, Cut Once”
- Start with a goal — what do you want the app to do, what problem are you trying to solve?
- Create a list of features
- Prioritize those features in the order that you think is most important, ask friends or coworkers about the app, what would matter most to them?
- Estimate those features — if they are bigger than 1 day, break it down into chunks so you can make progress each day
- Create a design (this step is tricky) — if you are just trying to do a basic app, then you could get away with using Bootstrap or a similar UI Framework to get the basics working. But I believe the best apps have a great User Experience. You could always tackle this later, probably not the best approach though.
- Create a rough delivery plan, which features will be delivered when. Are you working in daily sprints? Weekly Sprints?
Once you have a plan in motion with all the above, it will be easier to tackle an app. Although, there are still other questions that you will need to answer before you can start, which will determine what you will work on.
- Development environment — do you have one? This step took me about a week to get all setup.
- Which languages are you going to use? Is this JavaScript based? Node?
- Do you need to learn those before starting an application? Freecodecamp has modules to choose from to learn things, this could also be a good start. This will also give you some structure, which is very important for success.
If you are looking for a good book on building habits (the 100 days of code becomes a habit), then check out this book
I would love to hear from others who started 100 days of code and hear how far they were able to get, what they achieved, etc.
