I finished 100 Days of Code again, hooray!!
I kind of did 100 Days of Code again on a whim. A new years resolution to do it sometime this year. So I decided why not and started on New Years day. I don’t think I left enough time in-between runs (only 2-3 months) and I was burnt out on it by the second half.
Exercism exercises were supposed to be a daily thing to keep the github green when I wasn’t checking in code for anything else. Instead it kind of took over the whole thing. I was way too focused on finishing the Javascript track, and cleaning up old exercises that exercism broke. I am however glad that I defeated the dreaded Zebra puzzle and finished both the C# and JavaScript tracks. I almost want to finish the final 68 in the python track but I might be a bit burned out on exercism right now. When I recover, I might want to do the Typescript, and GO tracks too. Or maybe I should check out the leet code thing.
I am a bit dissapointed at myself for not making a proper gameboy game after going through that giant book. I couldn’t even make myself code pong or snake. That was supposed to be why I bought myself a chromatic after all.
Despite all of the version 3 documentation/online example problems I ended up liking the Vue library quite a bit.
I feel bad that the Food Logger with a Angular front-end/Go backend project kind of sputtered out and died when I got sick (I still have lots of gunk in my lungs). It would have made a nice resume project too. I do want to learn more GO. I bought the Writing An Interpreter In GO book, but not knowing GO very well was making it harder to understand.
Ollama was kind of fun, but I should really research how the vibe-coders are actually generating code and try to work that into a side-project at some point. If I ever redo my “home-lab” (which is a single raspberry Pi 3 right now), I think I would like to have Ollama on it to kind of act like a search engine/wiki of sorts. I wanted to do some image generation on it but it doesn’t look like that is ready yet, and I probably don’t have a good enough/correct graphics card anyway.
Revisiting the pico with the oled screen was fun. I was thinking I should make something like a single game gameboy with it (maybe the dinosaur game or doodle jump since the screen is oddly sized). Or it could be a status display on the new home lab if I ever do that. I did leave it running beside me in clock mode for a few days just for fun. I would still like to make a simon game with the pico too.
I wish I would have revisited my Basic interpreter to make it compile to a virtual machine or hook it up to LLVM and make a real compiler with it. Even just adding graphics would have been nice.
Lazydevs Academy did a follow up to the zelda top down movement code and made a program to walk around the overword of the first Pokemon game. I would like to revisit my code and do that. It would be nice to port that to the gameboy too.
I wimped out on too many days. There were too many times I almost called it failed.
Final Thoughts:
I am kind of two minds with 100 days of code. I do like that I actually get things done. However, it kind of takes over every spare moment of free time I have. I want to have a nice project each year/quarter. I just never seem to even get started if I don’t have a framework like 100 days of code to motivate me. Unfortunately 100 days of code also stops me from working on anything else. Every time I say I am going to be more casual about it but I never am.
Many years ago, I used to participate in Ludum Dare to motivate me to actually make something. It was cool but 48 hours is way too short. I don’t have the time or strength to do things in marathon sprints anymore. However, the longer week+ length of things like the OLC Code Jam are still up my alley. I could join a jam most any time at https://itch.io/jams, but most of them are run by weirdos or are thinly disguised marketing.
I think I would really like something that is much longer than a Ludum Dare Jam, but also much shorter than a 100 Days of Code marathon. I think I need a way to start a project and finish it but in moderation. Not dropping or never starting it, but not letting it overwhelm everything too. I also want the things I work on to be something I care about. Following along with a coding book is still cool too. I’ll have to ruminate on that for a while. Maybe I just need to get a big calendar, hang it on my wall, and start plotting out projects and milestones.
