#100 Days of Programming: Day 001
It is the start of a new year and customary of new years is where we aspire to meet our new year’s resolution. More often than not, we start off the initial motivation of building towards our goals before we eventually drop it about a month in. Like subscribing to a gym membership for a month and dropping it once the reality sets in that it takes a lot of work to be consistent. I like myself am one of many who have dropped from meeting resolutions.
The hardest parts of these challenges are the initial starting block. Oftentimes, we are so caught up with the idea of building consistent habits that we don’t plan for when our motivation can and will drop throughout our time building habits. We set unrealistic goals that often make it much easier for us to procrastinate on building consistent goals.
The reason why I preface this article with this is to help those understand the appeal of challenges and resolutions like #100DaysofProgramming and the common pitfalls that contribute to people giving up a few weeks in. I am here to not only publicly write the progress of my learnings with the material but also impart some helpful advice that can be applied to any challenge that one aspires to complete. Not just with programming alone.
Before we dive into the deep end, I need to establish my reason for doing this challenge. I am using this challenge to brush up on my technical skills in programming. I have been involved with mobile development recently through my job and have been dabbling in game development for sometime now. Yet I feel my skill set with programming in general feels so far behind than that of my colleagues. The dreaded creep of Imposter Syndrome ever looming.
In order to do well in this challenge when motivation does become low is to break down the challenge of 100 Days to something so small that its almost impossible to fail. Usually with the 100 Day Challenge the minimum is about an hour day of programming. But for those who can’t reach 1 hour consistently, one easy to break it down and build towards is to split it off into 2 30 minute sessions. Which seems a lot more digestible and leaves room for you to fulfill that 1 hour mark if I get invested into the learning material.
I will also be posting an excerpt of what I learned of that particular day, along with any progress I made with a particular project. As I believe the quickest way to retain information on top of organizing my own notes is building on small project after project. Perhaps a progress on a weekly project in order to have 52 check ins of progress I made on projects. This will be further expanded upon as I get through the days.
TIL section: I did a revision on my understanding of control statements through using Javascript. Its very important to distinguish the order in which you structure your decision tree. Along with using logic operatiors such as && (and) and || (or) to make specific checks on whether both or either or conditions are met. I also learned about switch statements and how it can vastly simplify control statements with a lot of numerical options and keeps the overall code more streamlined and easy to maintain.
I will take a break from my study session and press further on with CodeAcademy along with refresh my memory on core concepts at a brisk pace. It isn’t the only resource I will be using throughout this challenge so it will keep things more exciting in addition to my personal projects. So its all encompassing. Finally, for the sake of accountability, I will have a image of my Github contribution streak for a sense of accountability for myself. I am optimistic that this perhaps might be the challenge I need for the new year having learned from the mistakes and pitfalls of similar challenges. For Reference. I created a fresh Github account for easier organization.
This marks the end of the first day, I will go more into detail of my weekly plan in the next post! I am looking forward to take what I learned from past failed attempts and
