100 Days Of Code Challenge (2020)
It's the 103rd day of the year, and this blog post is going up to mark my completion of the #100DaysOfCode Challenge. In the last few minutes of 2019, I decided to make completing this challenge one of my resolutions for the new year.
I have worked full time as a full stack web developer at Austin PBS since 2016. While the challenge only demands one hour of coding each day, I tried to devote my daily hour of coding to working on something outside of my regular job duties. I didn't always meet that mark, but I did manage to achieve that for the vast majority of the 100 days.
Starting the challenge, I didn't really know what to focus on. I would work on a few Codewars kata, or work through a couple of Level Up Tutorials courses (CSS Animations and Gatsby E-Commerce), and I took a deep dive into Regex. But I felt a bit listless.
I was soon able to focus on a project I had left on hold for a while and I brought it to a level of completion: A site built on Gatsby, that uses Contentful as a CMS, Algolia for search, and is hosted on Netlify. The website itself doesn't have any meaningful content, but its proof of concept exists over at http://twentybreads.com/. To be completely honest, I might transition this whole blog over to that stack because those tools are just a joy to work with.
Around this time I also did my first pull request on an open source project. A Github issue was open for uses.tech for a Twitter social media card that appears when someone links to that site. I was able to close that issue by forking the repo, using react-helmet to insert meta data in the <head> tags, using a Static folder for a preview image, submitting the pull request, and modifying the pull request based on feedback.
At this point I felt I was off to the races. I did a sprint to launch a redesign of a website for one of our shows at work. I spent a weekend doing a fun little side project called Wild Ass Gradients, which is hosted on Github pages. Then I worked through the entirety of Udemy's WordPress Development - Themes, Plugins & Gutenberg course. This took up the majority of my #100DaysOfCode challenge, but along the way I started building my own first custom WordPress theme, and started a freelance gig. I really hit a stride and was firing on all cylinders and in a wonderful cycle of learning, building, deploying, and improving.
Then the world changed. COVID-19 came to America in a big way, and with it a tidal wave of sorrow, fear, and uncertainty. On March 11, the web development team at my job was sent to work from home for the foreseeable future. Two days later, the entire company went full remote. It's been over a month, and we haven't gone back and there's no certainty when or if we might. Businesses all around the country have closed. A lot of my friends who work in the service and entertainment industry lost their jobs. The freelance gig I started got canceled.
Our operations at work have also completely changed. Where we could previously do dozens of studio television productions on site before, now gatherings of 10 or more are forbidden. This makes any production pretty much impossible. We rallied behind our news and public affairs show, Decibel, to provide the trusted news coverage of local developments during this disaster that PBS is known for. We've bolstered and improved access to the educational resources that PBS has provided, for free, for a very long time to teachers and parents, so that there's trusted, curriculum-tested educational materials available for distance learning now that schools are closed. To do what we can to buoy ourselves for an incoming financial crisis, we're really focusing hard on fundraising and highlighting our service to the community.
This has meant a ton of work coding for my job. It's also been a tremendous mental and emotional strain. For the last month of this challenge, it's been about all I can do to devote myself to the needs of my organization, and focus all of my programming talents and meet the needs presented by this crisis the best I can. It's incredibly exhausting, but it's also rewarding working for a company that provides such a crucial service at a time like this. I also count myself so lucky to have a job in this environment. So many are going without, so I have to keep that gratitude in mind when things get rough.
I don't know what else to say. The world has changed since I started this challenge just over 100 days ago. It's now a fight for survival, and a sprint to be the community resource we define in our company mission. I learned so much by going through this challenge, advanced my professional skill set, and hit so many milestones that I never imagined I would set for myself. Thank you to everyone who cheered me on during this challenge -- I also gained 50 Twitter followers as of the writing of this blog post! The support in the global web development community is incredibly special. Thank you also to my wonderful partner who supported me in this challenge. It's not easy to give up an hour of your loved one's time, but she stepped in in a huge way, understanding why I was waking up early, or taking care of dinner while I coded just a little bit more.
My final thought on the challenge is this: If you're thinking about taking this challenge on during the current climate, be sure to go easy on yourself. It's a huge and taxing commitment, and at this point in the world, everyone's priority should be on maintaining good mental and physical health. I will not be turning around to do a round two of the challenge. Instead I'm going to rest, play cello, be the best damn web developer for my job that I can be, be as healthy and safe and positive as I can be for my partner and myself, and keep finding ways to challenge myself and grow during this time when everything seems so dark.
Be safe, take care of yourselves. As always, happy coding and happy cooking,
Joey