It’s been 323 days since I first started this coding journey. Today I finished the #100DaysOfCode challenge — a public commitment to code an hour on personal projects every day for 100 days.
One of Kallaway’s rules is that you can miss a day, but not two days. With the exception of 4 day breaks over Thanksgiving and Christmas, I achieved that… while completing DigitalCrafts’ Immersive Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp. Would I recommend everyone do #100DaysOfCode on top of a bootcamp? No. However, I would say #100DaysOfCode kept my love of coding in perspective through the grind of the final weeks of my bootcamp.
A few of the things I learned about on my own or created thanks to #100DaysOfCode:
- Algorithm solutions
- JavaScript Fetch requests
- API endpoints
- CSS Grid
- JavaScript animated photo libraries
- Ternary operators
- Accessible CSS dropdown menu
- PostgreSQL
- Web design standards
- Common responsive layouts
- React
- Redux
- Svgs
- Svgs in React
- JSON Web Tokens
React-router-dom- Javascript date time objects
- SQL queries and Sequelize
- Hierarchy in design (e.g. buttons, colors, typography)
- CSS animations
- Axios and its request headers
- Making sure server side has no unhandled exceptions
- Python Discord bot on Repl.it
- Writing a React app without
npx create-react-app
Looking back at the completed log, I can’t help but feel pride in how far I’ve come. In the beginning of the challenge, I spent days trying to decipher the appropriate endpoints for the Ravelry API that I eventually used for my first group project (check out Knitworthy and its Github repo). Now accessing the API is usually the easiest first step of a project.
Trying to find that extra hour of coding drove me to complete most of the optional assignments provided by the bootcamp. They often involved delete and edit operations, so #100DaysOfCode is partially responsible for my comfort level with CRUD operations.
Most importantly, when classes started in September, I had trouble starting projects — either from lack of ideas or fear of failure. By the end of #100DaysOfCode, my log entries changed from “I’ll try and get this feature of this assignment working because I want to” to “I built this on a whim in a new language and loved it.”
Conclusion
The #100DaysOfCode challenge and its online community welcome and challenge coders of any level. If you’re looking for a way to kickstart your personal projects this year, I would recommend it. If nothing else, at the end of 100 days, you’ll have a log of everything you learned about and created.
For me, that log is a welcome reminder while I’m job searching. Not only does it show how much I’ve learned in a short amount of time, but it proves a sustained desire to create with code… even when I’m already stressed out from coding 8+ hours a day.
I spent my final #100DaysOfCode hour rebuilding my portfolio — it was a template tacked on to a static site I made with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before starting the bootcamp. Now it’ll be a single page app built in React.
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