It's bank Holiday Monday and I think it's about time for a new challenge. I've been working a lot with Open Source lately, both contributing to other people's projects and refactoring/improving my own. My current contribution streak on Github is 8 consecutive days of published code, which is pretty awesome considering my previous best was 2 days from about 6 months ago. Not only is this making me a better programmer but it's also extremely fun. With this in mind I've decided the new challenge is to try and create a 32 day streak.
To many of you that may not seem a lot, but think about it a bit closer. Every single day for the next 24 days I have to push at least 1 commit publicly. When I was thinking about the details of this challenge over breakfast I decided the hardest part was finding projects to contribute to and what kind of contributions I could actually make. Another daunting factor is the fact I've just bought a house, I work full time and have social commitments. Fitting all of this together and still writing code for fun is going to be hard work, but worth it in the end I think.
What do I hope to get out of this? Like most things in life, people are driven by what they can benefit from and this challenge is no different. However, unlike most of the common reasons people do crazy projects or work silly hours the goal here is not to make money or have any kind of benefit other than self improvement. Hopefully by the end of this I'll be able to patch, contribute and create pull requests in my sleep. My greatest advantage here is that I'm quite quite young and I have the opportunity to put the time in and learn all of these skills now before I get too many real life commitments.
I think the only way I'm going to complete this challenge, or even come close is to plan out at least 2 days in advance what I'm going to work on and do the harder projects first, with an option to fall back on easier projects if time is an issue or unplanned events happen. This is your chance to help me out. Do you know any open source projects which would benefit from patches or enhancements? Your own work? A library you use daily? I'm open to all suggestions. I'll be creating a second post later in the week detailing the personal projects I'll be working on, some of them I think you'll find really interesting!
You can track my progress and check out the projects I'm working on at the following link: github.com/marcqualie