At the beginning of the year, I started another personal challenge. Same as I've done in many years. This year, however, turned out to be a challenge on its own. Truth be told, I really wouldn't have needed an extra one, yet here we are. Since beginning of the year, I've been quietly fighting my way through everything that's been happening. Now at least I've made it to the end of my intended personal challenge of the year.
What was the idea?
As described in the initial blog post (that turned out to be the only post about the challenge in the end), the core idea was to get back to building software and solving real problems. Back then I wrote "We can't get out of touch with reality of building software. I've been in the trenches for many years, and I don't want to lose those building skills." And as with every skill you don't want to lose, it requires deliberate practice to hone that skill. I even wrote this: "We need to be okay with doing something badly in order to do it at all. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly - as long as it's not causing harm."
My hypothesis was the following:
I believe that consistently investing time in building software will hone my skills to make problems smaller. I've proven this hypothesis when I've made at least 3 real-life problems smaller through building within 300 days.
To prove or disprove the hypothesis, I designed an experiment that I called #Challenge321.
For 3x100 days (aka 300), I dedicate at least 21 minutes of time each day into a specific topic, to build up momentum and a habit of spending time deliberately on what's important to me. That's why I call it my #Challenge321.
The three topics were #100DaysOfBuilding (building software to make problems smaller), #100DaysOfMovement (literally getting that movement in for health and fitness), and #100DaysOfGames (playing computer games for pure joy and mental health).
Now let's see how things turned out for real.
What happened?
For the first two months, I had momentum on all three topics. For building, I chose what to explore and tackle first, I made steady progress. I loved having the time and focus space each day to just dive into something, learn a tiny bit more and gain further understanding every day. Movement was covered through regular exercise, and I really enjoyed my frequent short gaming sessions.
Then life happened. Or shall I say conferences and community commitments? The first two months were already packed with session proposals to write and review, papers to submit, things to clarify with organizers. Then first submission approvals came in and suddenly everything became even more hectic. The problem: I had taken too many bets on too many things I really, really wanted to do. And then they came back positive. Most of them. And all had tight schedules and due dates attached. Plus, and that was my biggest mistake, all of this required me to create way too many brand-new conference sessions in very short time. One of these sessions was a paired talk, one that I would not have missed doing - yet it was a very close call for both of us to make this happen with very short preparation time. We rocked that stage, and at the same time it did cost us dearly. Besides that, I'm not even going to mention the countless other community commitments I made. No matter how often I had declined requests and opportunities this year or told people I could not make something happen or had to keep them waiting - the number of commitments I tried to make happen was simply too big overall.
Short of two months into my personal challenge, I had to make the hard call to stop it completely. I simply did not have any capacity left; I barely made it happen without the challenge. The only thing I kept on going rather steadily was movement. I had made that mistake before and I promised myself not to repeat this one ever again. Yet the other two topics for building software and playing games, they had to pause.
One thing kept coming after the other, the hamster wheel kept turning and I was just running, trying not to fall and keeping all balls in the air. One commitment followed the other. There was never a real break to catch my breath. Don't get me wrong, these were all endeavors I absolutely wanted to do. I knew the price and I was willing to pay it. And at the same time, it's been clearly too much. Plus, we may not forget everything else I had said yes to. Where I didn't want to disappoint people. Where I gave more energy than I had, for too long.
I took notes whenever I achieved another step on any of those three topics so I can see how things progressed over the months. For the building part, I stopped at the end of February and only picked it up mid of July again. Same goes for the games. But I decided to indeed continue the challenge instead of dropping everything. I had to put in a lot of effort, yet I did crack the 100 days for all three topics, curiously all on the same date: October 18th.
What's the result for each topic?
For #100DaysOfBuilding, I started out by taking my time to set up a new project, making my decisions on what to build, why and how, and then building things from scratch. I quickly discovered that for a change, I wasn't focusing too much on getting results quickly and pragmatically, but instead for truly understanding what I built, the options I had, what they meant and what good practices to apply. And to my surprise, with the world going super fast with building stuff these days, I really enjoyed taking my time for once to really understand the underlying concepts, patterns and practices. Going super slow. Looking up anything I’m not familiar with. Building actual understanding and enjoying how it grew. Truly taking my time, not pressuring myself or rushing. And that continued until the very end. I didn't build much software this way. I did build my understanding. It's been an intentional tradeoff and I both like and dislike it.
What did work out well for me was that I wrote a coding journal again, it really helped me formulate my intentions, track open questions, document resources and insightful finds. It also helped with being intentional with my decisions. Going through the journal again, I realized I had already forgotten a lot of the insights gained, yet at least they are there, I can look things up and recall them this way. I anyway have to do activities many times to fully grasp and internalize them. At times, I also did allow myself to follow rabbit holes before I led myself back on track. Slowly but steadily.
I had a bunch of initial building ideas, both for personal and work-related stuff. And yet, I stuck with only one pet project. Considering 100x21min (or more) I truly did not get far regarding the actual project. It would help to do those 100 days in a row for sure, not with such a big gap in between, and yet I still wouldn't have gotten much further. But learning the intricacies of a language through building and solving an actual use case is a great way for me to learn it through instantly applying concepts in practice.
Another realization is that tooling truly makes a difference for me. I tried to use a less familiar IDE in the beginning to learn more about it and see how it deals with the chosen tech stack. For the last 40 of the 100 days, I finally gave up and switched to another, more familiar IDE. And that made such a difference in how relatively easy things suddenly became. Good IDEs truly matter.
Finally, I'm glad I did this without outside pressure - I had way too much pressure this year to face that one on top as well. Would I have achieved more with that external public accountability? Probably. Also, I would have probably stuck closer to my original idea. Yet I wouldn't have managed that level of visibility along with everything else this year.
My #100DaysOfMovement was probably the most successful of the three topics. I indeed could recover a bigger range of movement, fix some of my issues that held me back from starting actual strength training and already gain a tiny bit more strength again. There are always fluctuations involved, yet I had clear signals throughout the year I'm going in the right direction. And I feel so much better as well.
When it comes to my #100DaysOfGames, I truly enjoyed those dives into the amazing worlds, gameplay and storytelling the games I had chosen offered. Especially in stressful times, just starting a short session helped calm my brain through focusing it on a challenging but solvable task and experience a story aside from reality. I draw a lot of energy from escapism, and it simply gives my brain a well needed active timeout. I just wish I wouldn't have had to pause playing games as much as I did - it was the same gap as for building, around 4.5 months. Once I picked up playing again, guess what, I was still under pressure but feeling a lot better again.
The conclusion?
The hypothesis I had was clearly disproved by my experiment. Sad, yet that's the truth. It just didn't work out the way I hoped for. I did not make at least three real-life problems smaller through building within 300 days. I didn't do that for even one of them. This clearly didn't work out in the way I hoped for.
It didn't help solve actual problems. I built something to solve a non-issue. Did it help with keeping the builder mindset upfront at work? Doubtful. It only solved the actual problem of not knowing enough about a specific programming language and framework. Learning, yes. But I'm far away from solving the actual problem I based this idea on.
Continuing like this as a side thing running over years would help in some ways. Yet it doesn't help solve my problems in the short term. For that I would have needed to choose a different mindset - a "raw and bad but good enough for today and instantly using my own thing" mindset. Instead, I chose a more theoretical learning journey. Through hands-on building, and yet.
At the same time, it was nice to keep building and learning, and I can make use of those insights gained at work. Could I have sped up my learning? Maybe. Probably. Yet given the time constraints and my very limited headspace throughout the year? Not really. My learning works through actual sifting through everything, getting through frustrating periods, processing all the feelings doing so, finally reaching those aha moments of understanding, and repeating this over and over. And it works best when I'm calm.
The 100 days worked out in the end, yet they were not satisfactory. It just proved again that I am a creature of practice and I need to spend hours over hours with something to be able to make use of things. No shortcut, no way around it. Alternatively, I can choose to stay on the "user" or "reviewer" side of things, but that's a totally different approach to take.
The other two side elements of movement and games were the best part of the challenge. I really need to keep those going as they will help me keep my health and sanity.
I hereby conclude my Back to Building - Make Problems Smaller challenge. I might or might not continue this path, yet not in the same way. I won't decide that now when I'm still under high load but first tackle my other outstanding commitments and then take as much of a break as I can. Whatever comes afterwards, comes afterwards.
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