50 Day Github Streak

Background

Yesterday I got to day 50 of my Github streak. I have commited at least once a day to my github account for the last 50 days... So what does this mean? Well to be perfectly frank it means nothing. I am practising dont break the chain for a few things and I thought "fook it lets do this with my commits too".

Rules

Any code commit counts. I work fulltime as a developer and sometimes I am not in the head space to do anything. Adding an issue or updating a README or even taking trailing whitespace counts, the most important thing is not to break the chain. I have several projects that I am adding to on a daily basis. Here they are in no paticular order:

Why?

I wanted to get better at my job. It is that simple. The only way you can do that is through practise. I think most developers shun away from doing this in public. I could use some online gamification apps to help me like Codewars or the excellent Codeschool. However I will lose interest easily with things like that. They aren't bad services - they just aren't for me. If it doesn't have a practical application I'll play with it for 10 minutes then move on. I am a bit conscious having my stuff out there for everyone to see but the way I look at it is this. At least I am doing something and I have the free time to devote to it - so why not? My IQ doesn't break the bank and there is nothing wrong with giving something a go.

XMLTVParser & api.whatisonthe.tv

One of the most obvious things to me was my old TVListings app. I have had that in several guises during the years. I have split it into several projects for various reasons. I hope they come together at some point. It is slow going but I know I'll get there at some stage. At the mo it is just a simple django app. The XMLTVparser is part of that however at the time of writing it is outside of the django app.

nestoria-python

A wrapper for the nestoria api. I was doing something on this and wanted a new django version. The current one works fine but I wanted to write my own. I really need to get this off the ground again.

swmcc.github.io

My own site. Not much has happened here. I am currently working on a new version of the site so I guess this will change in the next while.

dotfiles

The biggest change is my dotfiles or to be more precise my workflow in vim. I have added to 21 times since I started this which makes sense. Sharpening my toolchain and workflow has actually been very beneficial.

What have I found out?

As a result of doing all this I have found out that the don't break the chain is quite a powerful practise. My workflow/toolchain has benefited greatly from this. I guess adding CI to my own personal projects has been a great help too. I haven't really contributed 50 days worth of commits to my repos and to be honest I think this would be rather unrealistic to maintain. I wont find that much benefit until my projects start coming together more so I need to concentrate more on them which means setting time aside to actually do something instead of fitting it around what I do.

Conclusion

Possibly... I created an exercies repo for me to try out programming problems so I hope the next time I am talking about this I have a a good few commits in there. The TVListings project has interesting applications with bringing in new bits of tech into it (it wont be the usual CRUD type app). I would like my new site to be around too. I see that I am defaulting to python for everything. Next time around I want some JS/Jekyll/Ruby/Go in there as well to add to it. Lets see what happens.

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