12 Weeks, 12 Projects

As many of you know, I’ve been traveling a bit for the last few months. One way I’ve been keeping busy is by trying to get to a basic level of fluency with some of the big dev languages I’ve run into during my career.

Now, I’m realistic about this — I’m not going to be good enough to be a developer for a real company anytime soon. But I’ve always put a lot of stock in knowing how to do things myself, even if they’re not “my area.” I’ve worked with too many “I can’t do this — I’m not technical” people and I really don’t want to be one of them.

Turns out it’s easy to play the role of someone learning how to code and hard to actually learn it. You do a bit of Codecademy or Udacity every day and it feels like you’re accomplishing something…but are you really learning anything real-world-useful? To learn real-world-useful skills you need to do real-world-stuff.

So…I’m announcing a commitment here. I’m committing to coding out twelve working projects in the next twelve weeks, one per week. Don’t expect them to look great or be bug-free or production-ready, but they should do something interesting. I welcome whatever advice, criticism, hate, etc you have for me.

I’ll be posting about progress here to keep myself focused and hopefully get some good feedback.

Look for first project announcement in the next few days, and wish me luck.