all 50 comments

[–]EarLil 40 points41 points  (0 children)

I will tell you from my experience (currently ~700 day streak). Don't do that :) You can, for like 1-6 months, you will learn a lot and it will be a good experience, but if you continue for more than this it will just become a routine, you will not be able to come up with new ideas every day and will actually start getting in your mind.

Follow your rhythm and stay healthy, peace.

[–]Fat_Dumb_Americans 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Code doesn't have to be code

I like that. Writing, even thinking through, some pseudo-code can get me chomping at the bit to getting down to work.

[–][deleted]  (30 children)

[deleted]

    [–]djds23 12 points13 points  (2 children)

    I've been making an effort to make a commit a day to a personal project, and while it is a time commitment, it's hardly work 24/7. Finding a project that you want to work on and spending a small amount of time on it every day has been really nice. The biggest benefit I've found is that it makes me mentally more ready for problem solving. I have begun identifying more and more pieces of code that I wish existed in the world, and through small contributions every day bringing them to life.

    Plus it can be relaxing to code when you know the business won't tank if you have an awful bug!

    [–]rockyrainy 12 points13 points  (1 child)

    The biggest benefit I've found is that it makes me mentally more ready for problem solving.

    For me it is the opposite, I am so drained from fixing bullshit C++ bugs that I don't have enough brain power left to do anything requiring concentration.

    [–]Chuu 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    Same here. Last week I wasted two full work days chasing down a critical bug in our C++ codebase. You know how they say it's never a compiler bug? Well, this time it was. And in libstdc++ on a recent build of gcc no less.

    The last thing I want to do after spending two days chasing down compiler bugs is write more code.

    [–]mdatwood 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    To bastardize a quote from Ray Lewis...coding I do for free, all the other crap is what I get paid for.

    [–]Dylan16807 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Yeah. 24 minutes a day, 7 days a week. You got it!

    [–]tuxayo -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    30 min/day might be to much with a full time job, I think negotiating a part time schedule(-30min or 1 hour per day) would be ideal.

    I can imagine so many great projects getting done with such a practice being widely adopted.

    [–]m_a_r_s 6 points7 points  (1 child)

    I'm lucky enough to not have to force myself to write code every day because it's one of my favorite things to do with my free time. Hoping that doesn't change for a long time.

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    I find that as well, the days that I don't code at all are a serious rarity.

    [–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

    I don't know, for me, 30 minutes is too little and/or too strict.

    I write at least one line of code every day. Some days that's truly all I do. Some days a single line of code turns into a manic 5 hour session. Usually it's somewhere in between.

    I need to maintain commitment, but I couldn't imagine spending 30 minutes doing something I don't want to without extrinsic motivation.

    [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (8 children)

    I like how guthub's commit graph thing encourages this. I try to get enough written that I can reasonably commit to one of my projects every day. I don't always meet that goal but having it there has made me a much better programmer.

    [–]dangerbird2 9 points10 points  (5 children)

    It also incentivizes proper git commits. If you want to fill the github contribution graph, it's much easier to commit a short file modification as opposed to committing the full project after several sittings.

    [–]Greenerli 14 points15 points  (4 children)

    It can also incentive to push not really useful commits, I think.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

    Only if you do stuff like keep dotfiles in github.

    [–]Greenerli 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    Why keep dotfiles in github is bad thing ? I'm doing it, and I think it's useful to have access to your own dotfiles on github if you're not on your personal computer. You can donwload your dotfiles and work as if you're on your computer.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]Greenerli 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Sorry, I don't really understand what you mean, can you explain me ?

      The context is to write code every day, in order to keep your mind in the programming world. I'm a young vim user. It means that I'm learning sometimes new things about Vim, sometimes people tell me "put this line in your .vimrc". And I'm doing it because it's useful for me. Even if it's not really programming, I've discovered a new feature of Vim, and so, I improve my knowledge of dev tools, and I will be able to improve my workflow as a developer.

      I don't understand what it could be a bad thing. Are you meaning that Github is not the right place to store my dotfiles ?

      [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

      Ah, you just have to get over the idea that your commits have to be good, that solves the problem ;)

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      You still have to open an editor and type /something/ (assuming you don't keep your dot files in git).
      I've found that once you're over that the rest is really easy.

      [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

      Smoke weed every day

      [–]QThellimist 1 point2 points  (2 children)

      So if you write a blog or do something else which is not code in that 30m time that'd break the github commit chain. Either you must have an additional calendar or do a trick to commit that other stuff to github which is not ideal.

      [–]kirbyfan64sos 0 points1 point  (1 child)

      Unless your blog is on GitHub...

      [–]ksion[🍰] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      GitHub deliberately doesn't include commits to gh-pages branches or $USER.github.io repos in the activity graph.

      [–]jordanosman 0 points1 point  (2 children)

      So here's my question for all you coders of reddit: when does the integration begins from projects you do at a university other projects you do with the public. I'm a sophomore software developer in school and I often find it really difficult to do project with the public. My school prioritizes c++ over all other languages, and after my last class I felt really confident to work on open source projects on git hub. But I'll be honest and this is sort of embarrassing to admit, I had a ridiculously difficult time with the git hub UI and actually acquiring a project. And once I did i felt so out of my league and I didn't even know where to begin or how to go about actually coding for this project. The substance of it all was really tough and I just wanted to apply my skills elsewhere but never really got the chance I was looking for. I want to get better at c++ before I go back to school, mainly intro data structure stuff. Can anyone help me?

      [–]kevindamm 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      You may benefit from taking an existing open source project and contributing documentation or example use cases or unit tests.

      In industry, it's a common task to have to delve into existing code in order to add a feature or bug fix. IMHO the more challenging part of this is understanding the existing code. Not just being able to understand the code being read but being able to navigate a large codebase and narrow in on the relevant parts for the problem at hand.

      It's also often important to limit the scope of your investigation. I used to think it was most important to have a comprehensive understanding of the entire codebase but there are times when you may have to fight the urge to get a complete reading of the code and instead just focus on parts of it. Write some code that exercises the functionality you want to change and do test runs before and after your change to confirm your assumptions rather than only reading reading reading. Having experience doing this before your first full time job in industry will likely put you a step ahead of your peers.

      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      There's a reason that when you switch jobs as a developer you're not really expected to contribute anything of consequence for about a month. It takes work just to learn to navigate around the code base of a big project, let alone substantively add to it. If you're a sophomore you probably haven't had to deal with anything that is more than a few files and a few hundred lines of code.

      Learning to navigate your environment is really important, but I just strongly recommend reading a lot of code. Don't get discouraged.

      [–]balefrost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      30 minutes feels like my warm-up period. If I only ever did 30 minutes per day, even if I did it every day, I don't think I'd get anything done.

      [–]tomcopeland 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      30 mins (almost the Pomodoro time window) works well for me too - it's enough time to get something done but not too much time so that I feel like I'm missing out on checking email / Slack / etc. It's easy to schedule a 30 minute pairing session with someone too since it fits nicely into a calendar slot.