Dev-A-Day 0x01: The Dev (Mostly) Every Day Challenge
Written by
I recently announced on Twitter that I’d gotten a new job as a Sr. Engineer! I’d been developer heavy in many of my roles in the past, as much as I could, despite those roles not being explicitly technical or software development-centric. I’ve done a lot of development work in my “6 to 10” work as well, working on SketchyReq and tons of other small side projects. This blog itself is supposed to serve as a dev-blog as well as a place to work on my right-wing extremism research. I really do love development; to me it’s a sort of artistic feeling, starting with a blank canvas and an idea and, hours later with much headbanging frustration, ending up with something cool, often not entirely the same as what you intended. For someone with no art skills whatsoever, it’s a nice feeling.
Now, though, I have this engineering position and a thousand ideas and partially formed projects like SketchyReq. I need to hold myself accountable, to force myself to keep learning and keep building things. Obviously, my day job will help with part of that, but I still want to work on my own projects and to keep that passion going. That was one of the reasons I started my YouTube and Twitch channels and one of the reasons I switched from there to this blog. You can read a bit more about that move by reading my first blog on switching to less centralized social media.
With past platforms, I’ve chosen social media to help hold me accountable for continuing on those projects and… it’s largely failed. I’ve started and stopped streaming and YouTube’ing multiple times. Often it’s because the workload involved with producing a video is significantly more than the workload required to develop the project I’m depicting, or that streaming requires strict scheduling that I couldn’t really work out. Those are both big reasons why I switched to blogging, so I’m going to try out the same tactic here, with Dev-A-Day.
For Dev-A-Day, I’m going to be detailing different projects I’m working on, from big to small. I’m going to be blogging about SketchyReq development and other large-scale SaaS projects as well as smaller stuff like quick scripts to manipulate data or interact with an API. Sometimes, they’ll be technically dense, others they will be more of a discussion of the theory. I think this will be a good way to chat about cool stuff, to hold me accountable to work on cool stuff and to work with others on the cool stuff they’re building. It’s sort of like the #100DaysOfCode challenge, but… all the time.
I’m not likely to publish a new blog post every single day, and I’m not necessarily likely to work on something every single day either. Life happens. But DevADay is a better title than DevOccasionally or SometimesDev and it’s better to shoot for the moon and land among the stars… or something.
Anywho, be on the lookout for new DevADay stuff. I’m currently writing up a list of cool projects to work on and I’m pretty excited.
—
If you enjoyed this content, let me know by signing up for the weekly newsletter using the form above or the form on the front page, and consider throwing some coffee money my way on Patreon.
—