Let's Get Started
Our habits are the prison sentence we confine ourselves to. Our habits often make up where we spend our time and how we spend it. My habits landed me out of workouts, with lots of time spent on YouTube recommended, unsatisfied with my output at work and in marriage, with a general feeling of less than 100%. As we bump along a mundane season of life, feeling this way is totally optional. It is within our power to make change in our lives. That’s where this challenge came into play. A new life sentence.
This isn’t the first 30-day challenge I’ve placed on myself. Earlier this year I challenged myself to only listen to classical music and podcasts for 30 days. I never had an interest in classical music. At that time I realized that I considered myself open-minded when it came to music and that I should do something to give classical music a shot at being a part of what I regularly listen to. It didn’t take much time to come up with a challenge—30 days it was. I set out and completed it. I was hooked by the end of those thirty days. I listen to more classical music than any other genre these days. Podcasts are on whenever there’s an opportunity for me to listen (gym, walks, commutes).
Here’s where coding and workouts enter. I’ve been around code for a decade now. I’m still an amateur at the outset of this challenge. I’ve never taken the time to stick with coding so that the snowball effect of knowledge is conceived. This 30-day challenge is in determined opposition to that.
I’ve been active, and what most consider as fit, for most of my life. I played sports growing up and into a collegiate level. Upon graduating college physical activity came to a halt. I’ve visited the gym off and on through the years. Leaving the gym after a workout is one of the most mentally uplifting feelings in life. It’s a great way to start a day. We all know it. Yet, I have been like most and haven’t made a habit of going.
Two birds, one stone. I'm starting out on this next thirty-day challenge with the intent to workout 5 to 6 days a week and to make at least one GitHub commit a day. I'll continue to update this personal portfolio site throughout this challenge as I find little projects to improve it.
Two Weeks In
Two weeks in and I've just spent the last three days troubleshooting an issue with my website that was plaguing me. I followed pieces of this Next.js tutorial for creating a blog. I wanted to take advantage of Next.js' dynamic routes and learn more about the web framework, but stick close to their documentation. Their abundant documentation, learning resources, and repositories help to make this a possibility. I already had the skeleton for a single-page website that wasn't incredibly different from what you get out of the box with create-next-app, so for this blog I simply needed to plug in the necessary pieces to take advantage of dynamic routing.
The tutorial at https://nextjs.org/learn was easy to follow and my local environment was working just how I needed it to, so I hit publish. I slid on over to my portfolio's landing page, clicked the blog link, and saw a 404. Wait, I'm seeing a 404? That can't be right! Long story less long, that 404 took me three days to figure out. Funnily enough, it was a two-and-a-half-year-old Stack Overflow post that helped me to finally realize what my issue had been. A response in this article mentioned that he had an issue with hot reloading when his folder name casing didn't match up with his route casing. Immediately I remembered that I originally named some folders in all caps and later simply renamed those folders to all lowercase. I need to dig into Next.js' caching myself. Apparently, the caching of the original folder name had caused the issue I was seeing in production this whole time. I created a new folder with a new name, moved my index and [id] files into it, updated my routing, and voila! My dynamic routes were, finally, working in production.
I've found that I'm thinking about my little website a lot. When I wake up it's almost immediately on my mind. I'm looking around for inspiration on it often. I don't know if I'm going to be as hooked to coding at the end of this challenge as I happened to become to classical music. I hope that I do get hooked, but I'm leaving my mind open to the possibility that this may not be for me. After all, that's ok too. Getting up and going to the gym daily is a different story though.
Well, I don't mean that I go to the gym 7 days a week. I'm going 5 days a week for a half hour and I'm going for a run on Saturdays with a rest day on Sunday. I'm not feeling as hooked mentally to the gym as I am for coding. What I can describe is how good it feels to leave the gym. It is difficult to find something like a workout that makes me feel like I've achieved something while getting my blood flowing and helping me to stay fit.
Going Into The Last Quarter
I can't act like this challenge has been all fine and dandy. I'm a few weeks in now and my motivation has been in a bit of a slump over the past couple of days. Some of that can likely be attributed to factors outside of this challenge in itself. Life is wavy, after all, and the path upwards isn't flat.
I've noticed that my strength is increasing and I'm having to spend a little more time doing my workout to get sore. Those first few days of this challenge were much more rough. There is a kind of satisfaction when I'm going through my reps and realize that the weight is easier that is hard to describe. It is a good feeling. I want to continue this for another 30 days.
Coding is a steeper hill to climb for me, personally. I originally had been using ChakraUI for styling components on my personal website. I'm working on something else that's going to be more custom on the front end. One frontend framework that I almost constantly hear about is tailwindcss.com, so I'm giving it a shot for what I’m working on now. When I mentioned that coding is a steeper hill, using Tailwind means that I'm having to re-learn how I do my styling for this new project. I think the possibilities are endless with Tailwind and I'm excited to continue to work on my frontend skills. It just takes time. I'm ok if the snowball effect of knowledge takes time.
I am enjoying who I am becoming when I apply myself to something.
Closing In On The Finish Line
I'm 24 days into this challenge I set before myself. These weeks have gone by more quickly than I anticipated. From this time I've gleaned some things that have taken me by surprise and other things have been more obvious expectations. Obviously, I was expecting to get more comfortable with programming and I was expecting to see some kind of physical result from going to the gym. I've seen both become true. I am more comfortable with beginner items like manipulating HTML and CSS as well as the beginnings of some JS. I can spin up create-next-app and get going with something static via Next.js fairly easily. As far as the gym goes, I've started to see results. As a skinny guy, I have somewhat of a head start. Regardless, results require repetition. Some things have been more unexpected over the past 24 days.
I'm better at typing. I've typed daily for many years at this point. Still, my comfort with different keys and symbols across the keyboard has increased.
I desire different content. I've started to enjoy content on YouTube that's deeper than video gameplay. Even reading documentation is something I desire more. I'm more fulfilled.
My output in other areas of life has increased. I've started to become less habitually lazy and more prone to tackle something that needs to be finished.
I've started to look to structure other areas of my life more, like my time management.
As this … initial.. challenge is coming to a close I felt it apt to update this post. I have decided to extend this challenge to 75 days as well as add a personal item to what I'd like to do daily. So yeah, I'm now 24 days into what has become a 75-day challenge. January 28, 2023, will mark the end of this particular leg of this journey. I do not expect to extend this again. After all, 75 days is enough time to build a habit. It's enough time for a challenge to become a flow.
One last takeaway: It’s not that we can do anything we set our mind to, but that we already do what we set our mind to.