In many hobbyist communities, there's often a rally at the beginning of the year to participate in some sort of 365 Days of X. For example, in photography communities they often advocate for photographers to participate in 365 Photo Challenge, where participants are asked to take a unique, interesting photo once a day, every day, for an entire year. Now on its surface, this seems like a rather mundane task, but participants of these challenges will attest that they're anything but!

Now extended code challenges aren't anything new. Every year, thousands of developers participate in Hacktoberfest and Advent of Code, and Googling "365 days of code" returns result after result. So suffice to say, my idea isn't original, nor is it intended to be.

Why?

I've participated in 365 challenges before, and aside from them being wonderful practice for honing a skill, they are also a relatively painless way to continually propel you forward. Since you are expected to put down new, interesting work every single day, you cannot afford to let analysis paralysis set in. If you get stuck, you must find a way to continue forward.

Like many developers, I often lose interest in many projects during the planning phase. It can be absolutely hellish to approach a large project with little idea of how it's going to evolve over time. Rather than simply getting started, we get stuck in our heads considering all the "what-ifs". This challenge is the ultimate trial-by-fire.

Goals

Unlike many other 365 challenges, this one is not focusing on a specific project. Instead, I have only 1 rule: "I must commit and push code related to a personal project once a day". Now to keep with the spirit of the challenge, I will do my absolute best to ensure each commit is substantial.

Now while I don't have a specific project in mind, I do have a few general goals:

• I would like to finally get my personal website up and running on something other than WordPress
• I would like to become familiar with React and Redux
• I would like to learn a functional language
• Finally become consistent with my blogging by publishing a weekly retrospective each Sunday evening

This Week's Results

Since this is the first week of the year, it's a bit short at a whopping 2 days long. Regardless, I've managed to get off to a start by starting 2 new projects.

Personal Website

My first project this week was a big one! I managed to get my personal website migrated off of a self-hosted WordPress instance and onto a Static Site. The new site is built using Next.js, and by extension, React. For the time being, it's being hosted on Vercel.

As it is now, it's rather basic, but it does contain a blog, an about me section, links to my socials, and a dark theme toggle!

weather-cli

I rarely write commandline applications, but I saw an idea for a fun one: A command line weather client. While there are obviously many out there, it serves as a great jumping off point for translating the application into other languages.

Currently, it simply uses OpenWeatherMap as the provider, but it's implemented in such a way that additional providers can be added. Implementing more providers and extended forecasts are my next steps for this application.

Conclusion

While this week may have been short, it was still super fruitful! I can't wait to see what the rest of this year brings.