Essay 1: Introduction

Essay 1: Intro to 100 Days of Code

A journey of 10,000 steps begin with the first one

One fine day, warm and sunny, I decided to take up the 100 Days of Code challenge. This was shortly after I joined Twitter and found out that there are all kinds of groups over there. Elon Musk was in the process of buying Twitter and so I decided to join. Neil Gaiman is active there, too. Well, one thing led to another and I was looking over the hashtags and found one that says "100DaysOfCode" and was sufficiently intriqued.

So, I looked over the tweets, and found out that most of them does not feature any source code. And I may have missed it, but the point of doing 100 Days of Code challenge is to improve yourself, and part of that challenge is to publish the source code and share it with the world. The few that did take screenshot of their code do so with their favorite IDE, which inevitably means tiny, tiny font. Extremely hard to read. May as well not bother.

The suggestion was to publish your code on Github, and there's nothing wrong with that suggestion. I do have a blog account that I still post from time to time, and so I decided to just post it there. As long as it's available, no problem!

Most people actually have some kind of planning, either a book, or maybe, an on-line course. The name Angela Yu is featured with many of the posts. Another favorite of people is LeetCode. As for me, I don't have any established plan whatsoever. So, most of my time is spent trying to find the next feasible projects. The constant worry is running out of ideas to try.

The point of this challenge is to learn, and I decided to learn. That means taking something out that I'm uncomfortable with and improve upon it. As of this writing, 3 weeks into the challenge, it's been mixed projects so far. Leetcode challenges are there, but I actually skip most of them because I want to write actual, usable programs. That's a tall order, as I found out that just implementing the command line parameters alone would take upwards half an hour or so. That's just setting variables, no actual program coding.

As to the actual coding, I firmly believe that most of the program's core are actually very simple. To that end, I would screen capture the code from my blog, which means no tiny font! So far, I've been managing to do so in one screen. Exception is the SVG library, which is rather extensive, even in the first incarnation.

The best part of taking this challenge, however, is that it anchors my day. Excepting rest days, which is Sunday, I always code. If the time is lacking, then I code something simple, such as FizzBuzz. Overall, though, it has been extremely productive sessions. 

And that's the real benefit of the process. My coding skill is getting better every day. Of course, it wasn't lacking to begin with, but doing this challenge forces me to be extremely productive with my time. So far, I've been spending about 2-4 hours per day, including write ups. I'm happy with the progress I'm making, especially since other people would code a challenge, and I would code a whole program.

That cannot be overstated: I wrote a whole new program everyday! Not a little function, but a whole program! Now, the program maybe rough and in need of revising, which I will do as needed later. Also, there may be bugs or missing feature which means I spent some time fixing the bugs, especially if it's a program I'll be using later on the challenge. It's still a program a day, though.

That just goes to show, no matter how skillful you are, there will always be higher mountain to climb, and I have begun making my steps, one day at a time. Today, it's the 18th day, and I'm resting and writing this stream of conciousness for the time to reflect back from the day of completion.

2022 July 03