For those of you who stumble upon this post without any context, at the beginning of July, I’ve committed to continue the challenge of #30DaysOfCode until I reach 100 days. You can read about it here.

Summer is over and that means my challenge of coding for 1 hour every day finished. And what a ride has it been!

What was different this time?

While doing something for 30 days it’s not that hard, staying consistent for 100 days is demanding.

Summer made the whole challenge more difficult. Beautiful weather, fun activities and a bunch of great people to hang out with made sitting down every day for an hour tough.

Actually, there were 3 days, when I completely failed and did not write a single line of code. When it first happened, I felt frustrated and sad that I broke the streak.

And then I started thinking about the reasons I’ve started the whole challenge. I realized that it was never about the numbers and maintaining a perfect streak. It was all about acquiring the habit of engaging in the creative process.

Looking at it that way, the challenge was a complete success. Nowadays I always make sure to set aside at least 1 hour of focus every day. Taking daily steps towards our goals pays off better than running a marathon every once in a while.

What did I build?

I always wanted to have a website, but it felt too much work. But now it finally happened! Most of the time in the last 2 months I’ve spent coding it.

You can check it out here. It will always be a work in progress, but now at least is up and running. And it’s such a great feeling to have a place where I can do whatever I want.

I built my site with GatsbyJS using React with TypeScript. I put together the design by myself as well, with a couple of inspirations from the internet.

I did not go with simple website builders like WordPress or Squarespace, because I wanted to be in control of the whole flow. This makes it easy to try out any ideas I have.

Smaller projects

I’ve published my very first open-source project(more on that later), a small project to monitor stock levels of the phone I wanted to buy and worked a lot on my shopping list app.

What’s next?

I am going to continue with this habit. But I don’t feel the need to hold myself accountable by posting it to my socials all the time. I feel that creating became a natural part of my life.

I am going to modify the challenge from 1 hour of coding to 1 hour of engaging in the creative process.

This can be coding, writing or taking photographs. 1 hour will be the minimum time I want to spend on it every day, but I hope this will be much more in general.

I am going to apply the “2-day rule” as well, which allows me to skip the habit for 1 day, but not for 2 consecutive days.

I encourage you to join me! It’s incredible how many things you can achieve by working a little for it every day.

Thanks for reading! 🙏