What I Learned from Failing the 100 Days of Code Challenge
Like many new and learning developers, I have attempted the 100 Days of Code challenge. The idea is to spend at least an hour coding every day for 100 days. The idea of the challenge is to spend this hour not on following lessons, but on actual projects that you build in order to face real challenges and push yourself to grow as a developer. The website offers different resources on what you can do during the 100 days, but it’s really just up to you to decide what you’ll use those 100 hours to learn.
What I wish I’d known
Set a schedule
Know Your Focus
Have goals set up
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
Set a Schedule
At the beginning, it’s easy to keep up with doing your hour. You’re excited about it so you can easily get caught up in working on whatever project you have in front of you and this will even carry you through the points of frustration that will happen throughout the 100 days. But as the days continue to count up, and you’re like me, inevitably you’ll hit a point where you start to lose the beginners excitement. You’ll start to see the bugs and mistakes in your code as reasons why you can’t make it as a developer. You’ll want to give up.
And if you don’t have a scheduled time where you set aside at least an hour for this challenge, there will be no set routine to keep you on track. Setting a schedule for this, particularly since it only takes up an hour of you day seems a bit pointless. I’m not a person who is set on over scheduling my day, I’ve never been that type of organized. But I understand the need for routine. And I think that I would have completed the challenge had I set a particular time to work on it instead of saying that I would do it at some point in the day. Setting a schedule which includes not only the time when you’ll do the challenge, but also what you’ll be working on is so helpful! I’d recommend putting together a list of things you’d like to learn over the course and creating your schedule that way. Which leads us to the second point.
Know Your Focus
I didn’t have a direct focus going into the challenge. Ultimately, I think that’s partially what caused me to fail. I didn’t know what I wanted to say I had completed at the end of it all. I just knew that I was doing the challenge with members of an online community called Brown Girl Gamer Code and that it would help me be a better developer. That’s all I had going into it.
Yeah, I had to kind of focuses: complete the Angular project I needed to work on for a job prep program and start learning C# alongside Unity so that I could build the foundations needed to build games. But I didn’t really know how I would do those things during the 100 days. I didn’t have a scheduled focus on how I would be using that minimum hour every day to push myself to learn new things that would help me become a better dev. I already had to complete a Minimum Viable Product for my program, so the 100 days wasn’t really impacting that.
The dreams of become a game dev were also fairly undefined, so I didn’t stick with the class that I was taking on Udemy. I loved learning about it, but when I realized that the course I was taking was also built around teaching about the Unity engine, I wasn’t sure how they would fit into my needing to code for an hour each day.
I didn’t have a focus point or an idea of what I really wanted to be able to show people at the end of the challenge. So I became unmotivated to finish it. My project for the job prep program was due much sooner than the end of the challenge. So when that deadline passed, I stopped wanting to look at Angular and the project I had built. I wasn’t pushing myself to learn anything new after I was finished. Since I didn’t have a real focus, I couldn’t find the motivation to continue on with the challenge, I began floating my way through and eventually not doing the minimum hour any more. Having a focus point, an end goal, would have been a game changer.
Have Pre-Set Goals
Having schedule and a focus point are good, but without setting achievable goals, it can be hard to know how much progress you’re making towards the new skills you want to learn. While I may have been able to count wanting to learn enough Angular to complete my project as well as start learning C#, I didn’t really know what that meant. I never created goals that I wanted to achieve or actual skills that I wanted to learn about during the 100 days.
Even something as simple as
This week I want to learn how to use Angular services.
would have been helpful, but I never used this practice. The most I did was say that I wanted to complete one lesson on the C#/Unity course I was taking. But that wasn’t a focused goal. It didn’t have anything to it apart from wanting to finish a lesson. I was leaving what I learned up to the whims of the course instructor and that allowed me to put the responsibility of whether or not I did the hour of code that day to the teachers of the Udemy course. This is a problem because the teachers weren’t the ones trying to complete the 100 day challenge, I was. But not setting goals like
I want to learn how to get a character to move in C#
let me step away from controlling what I was doing during a given day.
Basically, it’s up to you as the challenger to make sure that going into the 100 days, you have a schedule set up for the hour. Create a routine and habit around it so that even on the days where you don’t want o do the hour, your day feels off when you skip it. Make surr that you have a clear focus on what you want to be able to learn during the 100 days. Go a level deeper than I want to learn HTML/CSS. What do you want to do with what you’re learning? Then make some actionable goals that you can work into your schedule. This will allow you to work them into your schedule so that you know what you’re trying to achieve during a given day or week.
What I’ll consider for the future
1. Smaller, more focused challenges
This is important to me because I work better when I have smaller projects to work on. It’s taking from creating focus points and goals that we talked about earlier. Having actual projects that I want to build will allow me to understand better how I need to break them down over the course of a smaller time schedule. Maybe next time I won’t do 100 days. Maybe next time it’ll be, lets build a small brick breaker game in 20 days.
2. 100 Days of Projects
While I’m currently interested in learning how to code, there’s so much out there that I want to do. When I finally acknowledge that I had failed the challenge (and it was a hard realization, I don’t enjoy failing things) I started looking up alternatives. My favorite one was the 100 Days of Projects challenge. This one lets you customize what you’re doing over the course of 100 days to whatever you want it to be. That means that I can mix in coding, writing, cooking, maybe even learning to draw into the 100 days. And so long as I make progress on some kind of project ever day, I’ll be leaning into the challenge. It definitely something that I’m looking at as I continue job searching through this pandemic. I’m wanting to continue building my skills up so that I can either get a job at an established company or start freelancing.
A last piece of advice
On the 100 Days of Code website, they encourage you to find a community that’s along the journey with you. As someone who was doing this challenge alongside a group, I can affirm that this is important. Going this alone is really hard because you can start to feel like you’re the only one struggling through it. I assure you, you aren’t. I definitely recommend finding a group that can commit to holding each other accountable through the challenge. We’re more likely to complete things when we feel like we’re not alone. So, if you’re thinking about the challenge, find a group to do it with.
Overall, I’m happy that I attempted the 100 Days of Code challenge, even though I failed it. I did learn a lot over the course of the roughly 60 days that I managed to complete the hour a day before I fell off track. I’m still committed to learning more about becoming a developer and honing my skills. Most recently, I’ve shifted gears to learn about WordPress development and I’m excited about that. I’m better about creating goals for myself as I learn a new language for this and it’s going well. I wish you the best on your learning journey as well. I hope that we’ll be able to tell each other what we’ve been learning! Let me know what you’ve been focusing on lately, what gets you excited to learn something new?
