#100DaysOfCode Challenge as a way to fight procrastination, social anxiety and tighten up my skills
Tags: 100daysofcode, beginners, webdev, procrastination
Published: 2019-02-01 04:21:28

---
title: #100DaysOfCode Challenge as a way to fight procrastination, social anxiety and tighten up my skills
published: true
description: In which I explain my reasons for starting the #100DaysOfCode Challenge 
tags: 100DaysOfCode, beginners, webdev, procrastination
---

I have easily put this off for more than a year. Today I finally decided to start. 

### Tightening up my skills
I've been a web developer for a few years now. I have some freelance clients and work with a Web Dev Agency. I'm quite happy with how my web dev career has shaped up so far but there's one thing that is bugging me: I have a scattered skill set and I'm not very good at any one thing. 

I started making websites using Adobe Muse because I started as a Graphic Designer - so I wasn't even writing code when my first client asked if I could make them a website. As my clients requested things that I couldn't do with Adobe Muse, I started to adopt a "learn as you go" strategy. As a result, I can do a bit of everything because I slowly learned things as the project/client called for it. I can design, I can do front-end and some back-end work, I can work with git, gulp, etc. But its hard for me to say that I am a Front-End Developer or a Back-End Developer because I feel like I don't know enough to consider myself one or the other. Its really left me feeling like I have huge holes in my web dev game. 

This realization recently hit me hard when I had the opportunity to review Pull Requests for a project. It really made me feel like I don't know as much as I should. I could follow what the developers were doing and I'm sure I could have hacked away at the same issues and solved them...but I was **so impressed** by their code! It was so pretty and elegant and *simple* - and I kept thinking how weird it was that I was responsible for reviewing their code when they obviously write better code than I do. 

The experience was a good one. It really opened my eyes and I've been trying to focus more on learning. I want to start with the basics and give myself the opportunity to really learn things properly. I largely enjoy Front-End work, so that is what I will focus on.

### Fighting Procrastination and Social Anxiety
Part of why I want to do this challenge is because I'm a big procrastinator. I'm pretty good at getting things done when it comes to client work, but when its stuff for me it is so easy to put aside and never get to it. I've started many side-projects but never followed them to completion and recently this has really been getting to me. There's this disappointment in myself that has slowly kept building up. 

And then there's this fear I have of posting things in a public space. Maybe its silly, but its quite scary for me and I think its one of the reasons why I've never finished my side projects or got involved with the Web Development Community. 

It is my hope that doing this challenge will help with these issues. 

### Day 1
Because I'm a huge procrastinator, I had to make today a very simple one. Otherwise I probably wouldn't even have started. So today I made a repo and a simple website to keep track of my progress. When I say simple I mean **very** simple: its just 1 html file with the Day 1 progress post. 

I don't think I will be making an update here daily - I'll do that on twitter. I do want to get more involved in the Web Dev community though, so blogging about things on here will be a good first step I think. I'll use this space as a way to share things I find interesting along the way.