Takeaways from my very first #100DaysOfCode Challenge

Tech is the only industry that fascinates me every day. I get to learn new things every day which is the most fun part about programming. The most powerful skill of spending hours and hours on solving a problem I always carried with myself from high school got highly appreciated finally in my life when I started my journey in programming and tech! Yes, it is another fact why I really love programming. Solving hard problems has always felt like a sweet treat for my brain. Truth to be told back in December 2019 when I started programming it has become one of my hobbies. Even when I take a break from everything I will do some coding for an hour or two just for getting out of boredom. Sooner or later I will get paid for spending time on my hobby if things go right till that time. But this #100DaysOfCode challenge was a hella cool journey because I learned another skill these days is that is time-management. As I have said coding is my hobby and I love doing it every day. So, to spend more time on my hobby, I started keeping journals for getting my college coursework and personal stuff done (In which coding was vastly included). I started my #100DaysOfCode challenge on November 24, 2020. Before this challenge What I learned didn’t have any solid foundations. Because I was jumping from one language to another and I was trying to learn Game Dev, AI & Web Dev altogether. Which was definitely my dumbness as I was a newbie. I have written another article only on that which you can check here: Newbie Article.

But Finally, on November 23, 2020 I made up my mind to focus on one stack first So I choose Full-Stack Development and started learning everything for it one by one. Now I know HTML5, CSS fully & Fundamentals of JavaScript & Python in a solid way. My motive was to code every day no matter what happens & I successfully did coding every day. My 100th Day is finished today. Here are some valuable lessons I want to share with you:

(1) You always learn things better when you make more mistakes. While applying what you have learned at the places you got stuck in the specific area you learn most effectively. So, always make projects based on what you learned at least in the case of learning programming.

(2) Taking a proper break between learning sessions is hella important! At first, when I started this challenge I used to try to work on projects and learning for hours and hours. Which was a disaster! And basically, I wasn’t learning much effectively. So, I started using the Pomodoro technique. My Pomodoro technique wasn't for 25 minutes I do 45min of focused work then take (10/20) min of a break.

(3) Consistency is the key. Trust me on this! I never believed it before as I believe it now. This challenge taught me how I can learn and apply anything by even committing as little as 30-45 mins of focused work every day.

(4) Always take a break when needed. When you don’t take a rest, your body will make you rest which means you will get burnout and get sick too. I learned it a hard way. Alongside learning to code, there was academic pressure too. So, whenever I neglected my body's need for rest it backfired on me like hell.

(5) Google is your best friend for learning any new skills. For programming along with google books has been a real best friend of mine too.

(6) When you use social media wisely it can create great opportunities for you! Or if not anything else you will find a really great community when you share your struggles for learning things on social media a huge amount of good people will always help! I found some awesome and kind people in the tech community from Twitter, Instagram, discord & twitch. Not only I love talking with them yet they really helped me a lot.

(7) You can learn anything but not everything, nobody can actually. In tech, no programmer knows every tech stack out there in the field. There are thousands of stacks but there are millions of people with their own area of expertise in a specific stack. So, it is better to choose a few and get better at those.

(8) Lastly, I learned to love myself throughout this more because I took one step at a time and I literally solidly learned many things. I know at the end of everything I only have is "myself". So now every day I make sure to be kind to myself. Because let’s be honest life is hard but a human can only do much he/she is capable of from their own circumstances. Sometimes the world can throw out a pandemic at humanity like it did in 2020. And hell! It was a worse year because of the Covid-19 outbreak which is still haunting us because it hasn’t gone away and people are still getting affected by Covid-19.

If you want to see my daily progress of this challenge and the projects I build in this challenge then check my twitter here: Twitter