One Year of Coding Every Day
In December 2016, I decided that I wanted to write code every day for at least a year.
I was already programming regularly for client projects, but my “hobby projects” were growing stale and I worried that my skills were stagnating. By forcing myself to write code consistently, I figured that I’d pick up new skills and build something I would be proud of beyond client work. Tracking my progress would be easy thanks to GitHub.
I’m happy to report that this experiment has been 99% a success. Including my first consistent GitHub commit on December 18, 2016, I have submitted 534 contributions over the course of 365 days. Sadly, I missed three days from October 16-18 when my entire family was sidelined by the flu. Overall, that averages to writing code 99.17% of days, for an average of 1.46 commits per day.
What did I work on? The public commits were for my open source projects. The vast majority were within private repositories where I’m working on a product, future open source projects, and experiments with languages that are newer to me. The product, Allsearch, will be announced in the first half of 2018 and it will have a large open source component.
Accomplishing this was incredibly tough at certain points. I found time every weekday, weekend, and holiday while balancing family and client work. Most times I was able to do everything on my laptop, but on a few occassions, Git2Go saved the day, allowing me to write updates from my phone.
I’m excited to share Allsearch with everyone in 2018. I’ll try and continue the experiment for a second year.