#100DaysOfCode – Midway milestone

50 days ago I started the #100DaysOfCode challenge and I have since been coding for at least one hour every single day. So far it has been a great experience and I have learned a lot. In these 50 days I’ve managed too complete some small projects and sharpen my general front end skills. Since I’m halfway through the challenge, I thought it would be a great idea to share what I have accomplished so far.

I have primarily been working through the Front End Developer curriculum at freecodecamp.com. For those of you who have never heard of Free Code Camp, it is an open source community that helps you learn to code. I think it’s a great platform for beginners who has no experience of coding and don’t know where to start. But it is also a great platform for intermediate developers who want to sharpen their skills. The curriculum is mainly comprised of a mix of different coding challenges and small projects. Since I started the challenge I’ve managed to complete 3 projects, 21 intermediate and 9 advanced algorithm challenges. Here’s a glimpse of what I have done so far:

• I created a weather web app using weather and geolocation APIs to receive local weather information
• I created a Wikipedia viewer web app using Wikipedia APIs to search different Wikipedia articles
• I created a Twitch Streamers web app using TwitchTv APIs to list and filter different Twitch channels
• I’ve learned more about Array.prototype.reduce when working on the algorithm challenge, Sum All Numbers in a Range
• I accidently broke my browser when using recursion to calculate Fibonacci numbers. It was an accident, I promise!
• I refreshed some of my math skills in set theory when working with the challenge Symmetric Difference
• I have improved my knowledge about RegExp when working with validating US telephone numbers

If you want to know more in detail what I have accomplished, you can check out my log that I keep at github.com/daon/100-days-of-code/blob/master/log.md.

The challenge has so far been a really good experience and I feel like I have learned something new almost every day. I really encourage you to give it a shot. I believe that it does not necessarily need to be for improving your coding skills, I believe that the same technique can be applied on other areas too. Maybe you want to improve your writing, presentation skills or something else – it doesn't really matter. I believe that the core concept for the challenge is to give you the motivation to keep on practicing when it gets hard or when it feels like you don't make any progress. I believe that it’s in these moments that we truly learn something and that's why it’s so important that we keep on trying.

Well, that’s all for now. Until next time, keep on coding!
Dan