It’s been two months of spending at least one hour coding every day. I’m pretty proud of this streak, to be honest, even more than my writing one here. Because coding daily is hard. Pretty darn hard. And because I didn’t have a plan or a learning structure on what I wanted to or needed to learn for coding, it’s hard to feel any certainty that I have what it takes to keep going. Today can be a good day, tomorrow bad. It’s emergent, and I’m improvising as I progress, changing course and doing stuff which will seem scattered and un-focused to a typical coding class educator. 

But it works for me, because it’s not about being beholden to an agenda, but following my curiosity and energy, sustaining my motivation and interest in the long term. Some days I jump around on projects, doing unrelated bits and pieces of learning here and there. Some days are about doing CSS and web animations and cool shit like that, other days I’m playing in my Vue.js sandbox, being fascinated by the client-side magic it can do. Even more days recently had me diving deep into Ruby on Rails API, and just before my two-month anniversary of daily coding, I had spent 4 days trying to solve a bug between my Rails API and Vue app. It’s the longest I ever spent on a coding problem, and many times I felt like throwing in the towel. But today I finally solved it! I’m glad I stuck it through. Because I do foresee many more moments and even more bugs like these that will appear in my journey, and I can’t get defeated just yet. 

But my wins were not without the support and help from others - @craigpetterson and @gabrielchuan being awesome Rails mentors, @yuyu on Vue and Nuxt, and and good ol’ @stackoverflow of course. 

Funny side story: I actually posted my very first question on Stack O yesterday, and scared as hell that I might get slammed by the elitists there. But it went well, I wrote a good question I believe, but in the end the help was only marginally useful this time round. I ended up answering my very own first question! Do I get double points for that lol?!

So…two months of daily code, like daily bread. During the many moments when I squashed a bug, I felt so soaringly victorious to the point of feeling like my day’s work is done. It’s been strangely satisfying, and surprisingly fulfilling. Here’s to many more coding wins to come! 

Onwards to #100daysofcode.