Saturday, March 28, 2009

365 Days of Code

That's right... one piece of working, usable, non-trivial code (ie: it actually does something useful), every single day, for an entire year.

Ambitious? Maybe. Necessary? I think so... you see, at some unknown point in recent history, I made a conscious decision to strive to be The Best at what I do. And what I do, is Code. It's my Art. I don't do this for a living because it pays big bucks or I'm trying to become a millionaire, I don't do it because I figured computers would be a safe bet for finding employment, or anything silly like that - I have another ridiculous explanation: for some reason, I love programming. Yes, I'm a big geek. And because it's something I love, my goal is simpler, although much harder to achieve: perfection, or as close as I can get, in the Art of Code.

Impossible? Definitely... but that's besides the point, which is that no one ever became a rockstar by sitting on their ass and dreaming about how awesome it would be - they did it by playing their guitar for hours on end every single bloody day until their fingers bled and they were really, really, ridiculously good at it. And then (hopefully), they practice some more, because even though everyone else already knows they're awesome, they still don't think it's good enough.

And so, we come to the real point: I'm not going to become the next Torvalds or Kernighan or Knuth (yes, these are my heroes, that's how much of a nerd I am - there, I said it) by working a lot of overtime, reading, or cranking out a lot of code, but only by making a conscious effort to hone my skills, any and every relevant way possible, every single day. No samurai was ever born on a couch.

I need to turn my Art (which, althogh already pretty awesome, is still just stick people playing kick-ball on a piece of loose-leaf lined paper), into something closer to Code Budo. The Way of the Code Warrior. The Art of the Software Sandbenders.

So. One (at least) piece of working code, every single day, for an entire year.

And here... we... go :)

2 comments:

  1. Alright! I'm looking forward to getting the updates! Where are you going to focus your attention? The phone, the web, the app?

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  2. Alright Rudolpho, this is good. I have your first few days planned for you already:

    Day 1 - Build code to support a hockey website template
    Day 2 - Build code to support tracking of payments for website template
    Day 3 - Build code to implement spamming mechanisms soliciting payment for website template
    Day 4 - Build code to plot revenge for non-payment (this one may be challenging)
    Day 5 - Build code for assassin robot brain
    Day 6 - Build code to remind you every "X" minutes to get over it, it's not worth the court time
    Day 7 - "insert next piece of code"

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