I’ve been thinking about it for at least a couple of months and I’ve decided to embark upon #100daysofcode. Why? Because it’s there!

No, truthfully, I’ve wanted to do this since I first saw the tags on various Instagram posts that I’ve seen. The thing that’s been stopping me is that I literally cannot commit to 100 days straight of code. Probably the soonest I could do that is December 1.

So while I’m starting the #100daysofcode challenge today, September 4, there are two major changes I’m making to the rules for myself. The rules state you need to code one hour a day for 100 days and you can only skip one day every two weeks, adding that skipped day to the end of the 100 original days to ensure that you are actually doing 100 days.

The first rule change here is that I am not going to code from September 25 until the 29th (may or may not be inclusive). Why? I have a work trip. I definitely do not think I can get away with sitting in my room coding for an hour a day when the rest of my colleagues are hanging out and chatting and getting to know one another. As such, instead of this challenge ending for me on December 13, it’ll end much closer to December 18. Or possibly later.

The second is that every November, I participate in National Novel Writing Month. That means that I should be striving to hit 1667 words of creative writing during every day of November. It rarely actually turns out like that — I’ll sometimes go several days without writing and then will suddenly write 7,500 words and will catch up. However, the goal is 50,000 words in 30 days and so because of this, I’m giving myself permission to skip coding 1-2 times a week during November.

So that’s an additional 4-8 days, which beings me to December 22 to December 26. Obviously, you have Christmas in there, too, which needs to be accounted for, so here’s my thinking: in the 119 days between today and December 31 (inclusive), my aim is to reach 100 days of coding for at least one hour a day. That’s totally doable. I may even come in ahead of that projection, depending on how well the writing goes in November.

19 days is a bit of a buffer, definitely, but I think this is an achievable, albeit challenging goal. I did think about putting this off until December 1, when I could conceivably actually do the challenge as intended. But what’s the point of putting off something I want to do that will encourage me to do something I should be doing? While I’m a life-long procrastinator, it seemed silly to me to hold off on this challenge for another three months.

I’ll be primarily posting to Instagram, but those posts cross-post automatically to Twitter. Follow me on either: the username for both is juliebugmtl.

And now, to get a cup of tea and start my first hour of coding in this challenge, since it’s 7:14am and I’ve inexplicably been awake since 4:30.