It’’s been three months since I started my latest streak – an hour of code every morning, every day, without fail. Most days I touched actual code, hand-typed them out. Some days I would do conceptual learning, reading up a lot of docs, blog blogs, tutorials. I started on 21st July, and had since documented my progress every month that passed, including some of the days in between as well.

First month felt like the honeymoon period. Started slow with structured courses on Vue School but went on to tinker and play with code on Codepen. Had sooo much fun and fell madly in love with the rush of creating mini web apps and UI features as I learned Vue.js. Frontend development was my kinda thing, and it was exciting and delightful, in a lighthearted way. All was good.

The second month felt intense and satisfying, quite unlike the easygoing, smooth mornings of the first month. I actually started to dive into the deeper end of the backend via Rails, reacquainting with models, controllers and views, understanding servers and deployment all over again. I hit quite a number of walls this month, posted my first Stack Overflow question, but I still felt victorious. 

The third month was when things started to wobble, my motivation wavered somewhat, and I felt a little lost and confused over technology choices, and the decisions and motivations around it. Rails vs Strapi/Node.js. Monolith vs JAMstack. Certainty vs curiosity. Destination vs journey, ends vs means. All the momentum from the first two months came to a halting drop. It might be due to Mercury retrograde, but blaming astrology aside, I see that even such difficulties offered great learning opportunities. Like how to think about tech choices and trade-offs, reflecting on my deeper motivations, and walking away with greater clarity on how I can go about thinking about such things in the future.

There’s about a week more to 100 days of code, on the 29th. That could be a good juncture to finish up this apprenticeship of mine and move on to the next phase. I’ve not decided at this point. I might just keep going anyway, but just not count the streak. To be honest I don’t even know what the next phase might entail! But something tells me I need to shake things up a bit. 

More to come, on Day 100!