The problem

Ever since my role changed from a software engineer to a engineering manager, I’ve been coding far less, my contributions were mostly in the form of code reviews and the occasional bug fix, and this has fueled a feeling of longing to actually write code again, to be able to create something from scratch. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’ve decided to try and do something about it.

The solution

I’ve decided to try and do at least 1 commit every day, this is a small experiment to see if I can get back into the habit of coding, and to see if I can actually do it every day and to keep myself a bit more accountable, I’ll be posting weekly updates on my blog here. This comes from the personal learnings of the last few years that I have spent reading through various books. One of the most influential ones was Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I highly recommend, it’s a book that has a lot of actionable advice on how to build habits and how to break bad ones.

This brings me to this little personal experiment and a few of the rules I’ve set for myself:

1. At least 1 commit every day
2. There is no minimum size for the commit, simple documentation changes are just fine
3. The commit can be in any project, personal or open source (here’s hopping I can get myself involved more in open source)

So what did I do this week?

It has mainly been about some demo projects utilising various new web application development technologies, well not new per se, but certainly new to me. These were NextJS , Tailwind CSS and Fly.io . Some CMSs like Strapi and Payload , which might or might not feed into another project in the future. I’ve also been investigating a new auth system Zitadel which is showing a lot of promise for a small new startup. And I’ve also updated the Hugo theme izi used by this blog by doing some RSS bug fixes.

That’s it for this week, it’s not much but it’s honest work. Looking forward to giving a week 2 update.