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Patryk Jeziorowski
Patryk Jeziorowski

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First week of the 365 Days Of Blogging Challenge!

So, in the previous post I announced the challenge of blogging daily for the next 365 days or sending $1000 to a random person chosen from the comments section.

After doing it I received tons of comments (hopefully not just because of the potential easy $ you may win if I fail :D) about what am I going to write about, about the quantity and quality of the articles and so on.

A few fellow dev.to members suggested that I should substitute the goal of "1 article daily" by "x words daily" to make sure the published articles are high quality.

Quality over quantity

I agree that goal of writing "X amount of words daily" may lead to higher quality posts, so I decided to follow the suggestions I got in the comments section, and instead of publishing 1 article a day, I'll be writing 500 words daily, or 3500 words weekly.

This is a quite aggressive goal - as @InHuoOfficial mentioned in his comment, this would result in writing basically two novels in one year (over 180K words!).

Topics of the posts

To answer all the questions I had about topics of the articles - I'll be writing about things I'm currently working on at startup I help to build, about things I'm currently learning, about things I'm interested in.

I'm a pretty geeky tech person, so it's going to all revolve around software, programming and tech topics. You may also expect stuff about productivity, biohacking, and basically anything that may help you in your tech journey.

If this challenge goes well, I'll also describe my case study and show you how I managed to write and publish consistently over such a long time.

Writing in Public & Transparency

To keep the challenge fair and give you visibility into the process, besides publishing articles, I'll be publishing drafts of posts to a public Github repository (which is the repo of my private blog BTW).

You'll be able to track what I'm working on, topics of following articles, number of words or whatever you want to know about my writing.

Changes in the challenge

So, as I previously mentioned, I'm changing the numbers in the challenge - instead of publishing 1 article a day, I'll write 500 words a day, 3500 words a week, over 180k words (2 novels!) a year. I'll do the counting, reporting and tracking if I meet the challenge's goals every week during the weekend.

If you want to be informed about progress and the results (and also about the potential $1000 winner in case I fail), you can sign up to the newsletter I quickly created for the purpose of this challenge.

Stay up to date

Besides the newsletter, I'll publish all the articles (and challenge updates) here:

And drafts:

It all starts this week!

Please let me know what do you think about the changes and the form of the challenge. I'll try to constantly improve the process, but I'd also like to start the challenge ASAP (this week), so any feedback now is highly appreciated!

Latest comments (20)

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tinyg210 profile image
Anca

I'm actually very curious about how this will go, especially since it takes me quite a bit to put together a consistent article/presentation/demo. I might learn a thing or two about it. good luck!

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aalphaindia profile image
Pawan Pawar

Good!! Keep posting.

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tqbit profile image
tq-bit • Edited

ha, I just recently listened to a blink where the author suggested exactly what you're writing. Consider me your worst enemy for the next 365 days, if I find the time, I'll write an article tracker to hunt you down >:)

If I get hit by your gen, I'd like you to do a donation to the Wikimedia foundation tho. Perhaps for the next challenge, you could go 50 / 50 between $ and donation for one of the user's favorite charity as well?

Much success and may the odds ever be in your favor.

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pjeziorowski profile image
Patryk Jeziorowski

Sounds good!

Do you remember what was the name of the book from Blinkist?

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tqbit profile image
tq-bit

'The Procastrination Cure' by Damon Zaharides.

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pjeziorowski profile image
Patryk Jeziorowski

Thanks, I'll check it out

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funbeedev profile image
Fum

Wow what a commitment!! I publish weekly on my blog and that's already more than enough for me..

I think it's awesome you're looking for accountability. I'm currently building up a community for developers that will be focused on creating an environment where members can be held accountable for goals they set for themselves. So what you're doing is fascinating to me and I will check back once a while.
Hope it goes well for you :)

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pjeziorowski profile image
Patryk Jeziorowski

Hey, thanks for the warm words!

How one could join the community you're building or just take a look at what you guys are working on? It sounds great :)

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funbeedev profile image
Fum

The community is called inspirezone. We are still fairly new but hoping to grow steadily :)
Learn more about it here:

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egilhuber profile image
erica (she/her)

This post is ~500 words - excited to see how this goes! Word count vs article count does seem like a better metric for this.

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pjeziorowski profile image
Patryk Jeziorowski

Yeah, definitely word count seems like a better metric. I'm also excited to see what's gonna happen haha! I can already tell that it's quite exciting from my POV and the risk of losing money already pushed me to write today (I wouldn't publish anything without the challenge).

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codeboi profile image
Timothy Rowell

First agan!

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samuelroland profile image
Samuel Roland

1 minute and 10 seconds!

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codeboi profile image
Timothy Rowell

Yep!

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pjeziorowski profile image
Patryk Jeziorowski

You're incredible! How did you do that!

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pjeziorowski profile image
Patryk Jeziorowski

I'm pretty sure you've already built a bot to comment on every single article I publish, haven't you? :D

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codeboi profile image
Timothy Rowell

HMMM...

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codeboi profile image
Timothy Rowell

Dude im 13 im not that smart... Or am I???

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samuelroland profile image
Samuel Roland

Okaaaay guys, let's start another challenge (!): let's try to comment on every article published by @pjeziorowski ! To show our support.
Btw that's a good idea to focus on quality and to have your blog repos public.

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codeboi profile image
Timothy Rowell

ok!