Everyday Commit 📖
I’ve decided to start a new challenge for myself: committing every day for the next 100 days. I realize that I watch a lot of tutorials and read a lot of articles, but I don’t practice what I learn. I’ve been trying to update my mindset to “done is better than perfect”, but I still struggle with the feeling of “I’m not ready”. Ironically, this is why I fell in love with programming: I liked the fact that I had to be in _there’s no wrong answer. I recall that someone once said even the code that looks stupid now was probably the best code at the time. Constant learning is often painful and frustrating, but I do like the way it makes me a person who is more open-minded and curious.
You can take a look at my commit history as of today (June 26, 2023) below. It’s not too bad, but I rarely commit on the weekends. I’m hoping that this challenge can push me to get into the habit of committing or developing every day.
Rules
Before I start, I want to set some rules for myself. As the goal of this challenge is to get into the habit of committing every day, I don’t want this experience to be too stressful. Also, I will be applying what I learned from reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.
- I will commit every day for the next 100 days.
- It doesn’t matter how many lines of code I write, I just need to commit something.
- I need to prioritize the commit that shows visual progress (e.g. adding a new feature, fixing a bug, etc.) over the commit that only changes the documentation. — Rewarding my brain
- I will reserve at least 30 minutes every day to work on my personal project.
Goals
While the broad goal of this challenge is to get into the habit of committing every day, I want to set some specific goals for myself.
- I want to build a community website by myself
- I want to learn Next.js
- I want to practice TypeScript
Thoughts
My real goal gets exposed here: I want to gain confidence. As a self-taught developer, despite the fact that I’ve been working as a software engineer for almost a year now, I still feel like I’m not good enough. I still feel like I’m not a real software engineer, and this feeling is holding me back from truly enjoying my work. Recently, I realized that the only way to overcome this feeling would be to show myself that I can build something. I want to build something that I can be proud of, and I want to build something that I can show to others. I want to build something that I can call my own. I want to build something that I can be confident about. I won’t have a hard deadline for this project, as I want this project to help me enjoy the process of building.
++I debated whether I should call this challenge “growing grass 🌱challenge” or “everyday commit challenge” since my goal would be making my commit heat map look as green as possible 😌. I ended up going with the latter, as it’s more self-explanatory.