My 1st #100DaysOfCode Experience

How I Learned to Embrace Coding

Back in 2019, I was frustrated with myself, having to think about things of what could have been if I had the opportunity so. I have always had a strong interest to dive into Software Engineering and go further into it but always had mental roadblocks preventing myself from making a head start on my career.

Around September I had followed some medium posts about teaching yourself how to code when I discovered that I came across a common hashtag that was referred to as #100DaysOfCode. So, I was curious enough to look further into it as a challenge for all difficulty levels on the title itself code for 100 days and document it.

What I learned through my experience

What I had learned through my Experiences of #100DaysOfCode was that It had taught me fundamental knowledge and ways to find skills and resources that are free and available like Code Challenge websites like HackerRank and the Free Developer Education website like FreeCodeCamp.org. The takeaway is throughout is that I made a lot of mistakes and I’ve learned to love it.

Embrace your mistakes

Throughout my time coding a simple project/task, I had learnt that you must acknowledge your mistakes because I feel it is one of the key components of how to learn how to be an amazing engineer as you can quickly master these skills in the future.

Challenge’s from Hackerrank to coding your Videogame

At first, I lacked any real idea of how to approach the 100-day coding challenge aside from doing the tasks in FreeCodeCamp, doing the 10-day and 30-day challenges that are available on the HackerRank website and eventually intrigued me to do more personal projects in this challenge like making games.

Archiving my work and the use of Social Media

If there is one that I had taken a considerable amount of experience out of this was the fact that I had wanted to archive my work on the internet but had a lack of knowledge of how to do it and I noticed that people were using Git or GitHub to transfer their work into the internet. I learnt how to roll back the history, push and pull requests and utilizing how to use the GIT command prompt and being able to archive my work through GitHub.

I also learned how to use social media for the means of a software developer for my benefit, granted it kind helped me with my social woes for using social media in general but social media for the scope of a project is quite beneficial as means to public document your work and have people encourage you who are also going through with doing the #100daysofcode challenge.

My Challenges and Caveats with the Experience

One of the many challenges that I had with this #100daysofcode challenge that I had are:

• Social Media: I saw a lot of people who were doing the same challenge as me and they are quite proactive with updating their status on the challenge as it is one of the rules of the challenge. As I missed out on days, I kept procrastinating about updating my status that I never did until the last days where I had the confidence to it.
• Consistency: I had a lot of trouble with being consistent with my work and daily projects to the point where I kind of procrastinated and left it to the last month to do the last remaining projects. And whenever I was at a roadblock with not knowing how to do it, I would leave it until the next day and the work would pile up.

How I Changed My Mindset with Coding

My mindset with coding was typically when I engage in code where I would often procrastinate and look at my problems like if statements or media queries as examples because I would often leave that work to the next day. It would pile on so much that it became stressful to the point that I to put my work to git and document what I had done.

Learn through Bite-sized Exercises

What I have learned is that if the exercise/project is overwhelming in terms of scope you can approach it by looking up the errors and by seeing the exercise through that problem alone instead of the whole project that way it would be less stressful in the grand scope of the project.

What I Would do or Change if I Did It Again?

What I would do to change my experience of the #100DaysOfCode challenge would be to create a themed version of the Daily Coding Projects/Activities, like either make it Game Development based or do some web design/development style or do something that would be more appealing for me so that it creates more incentive to create a more approachable experience than what it was.   

Conclusion

It has been a wild 100 days but all in all, it was an eye-opening experience and anyone who is a software developer/engineer of all skill levels, I highly recommend giving it a shot because it is engaging doing things like making a single project a day and documenting that work as an outline of progress. It feels very reminiscent of a Game Jam and I suggest giving it a go.

Shoutouts and Credit

My GitHub

HackerRank

Editor’s Note:  Procrastinated a lot and never got the time to finish and publish this so finally here we are. Hopefully I can look back enjoy myself being happy and embarrassed reading this.