Before I share my 100 days of code, I have a little confession to make. Even though I'm a software engineering student, I didn't know how to code or even bother to learn for the first 2 years of university. This was because I had a bad first impression of programming. The first language we were taught was C and I hated it mainly because of 2 things, firstly, because I thought I had to be good at math to really understand the logic and be a good programmer and secondly, I thought have to be taught every little thing from the syntax to all the algorithms and everything in between. That made me almost quit programming.

In my second year, I started learning web development, I fell into the tutorial hell and I just gave up thinking programming just wasn't for me, to an extent where every time I open my code editor, I just get this anxiety and frustration that I just close it down after a couple of minutes.

Last year August 2020, I finally decided to really double down on learning web development, I finished the web design course on Freecodecamp and got my certification. The 100daysofcode challenge is something I've been hearing of for a while but I kept pushing it back because I was still reluctant about coding every day as I thought that's not something I could do. In February, I read about the challenge on Freecodecamp's blog and made more research about and eventually I took the challenge. I was posting my progress on Twitter using the #100daysofcode hashtag which but I still wasn't very consistent and I jumped from one platform to another not having a definitive plan or roadmap of where exactly I was going. As I got deep into the challenge I started slacking off and eventually around day 50 and eventually quit at around day 60.

In June, seeing that we're done with the semester at school, I decided to give it another go and this time around I started on the 1st of June and documenting my journey on Instagram. I wanted to cross-post on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Github but I found it to be too tedious and time-consuming having to post everyday on all those platforms, so I just settled for Instagram, also because I was trying to be more consistent on Instagram and trying to grow my following on the platform(Sadly, that account got hacked towards the ending of the challenge so I had to create a new account to continue documenting my progress).

This time around I decided to follow the curriculum from the TheOdinProject, seeing that it's already well laid out, I just need to use their references and build their projects. This time around I went hard and really concentrated on the learning process. I decided after every project I'll take a break for about a week and practice some algorithm challenges and read a couple of stuff from a book.

And now, 100 days later, I've finally completed the challenge. It definitely wasn't an easy ride, there were a lot of bumps along the way, there were days I don't feel like doing anything but I just have to do it even if it's at least an hour because I can't post about what I did until I do it, so that kept me grounded and made me sit down and really put the work in. There were days when I was so busy that I didn't have enough time to work the way I wanted to. There were even days I have to put projects I'm currently working on aside because I can't concentrate so I'll just do something less cognitively demanding or practice something I'm already familiar with just to keep the chain going. There was a time I even had to code in a train, and if you're in Russia, you know how long-distance trains are(very little room to do anything). Nevertheless, I managed to get some coding done.

This has been a long and bumpy journey but I'm happy I did it. I learned a lot more than I imagined and in the process built a lot of projects. You can find some of the projects I've built on my Github.

Finishing this challenge is just the beginning, I've still got a lot to learn but due to school, I'll be slowing it down a bit to concentrate on my final year project and dissertation. My current goal is to be a full-stack developer and I won't stop until I achieve that. With that, I'm looking forward to many more challenges to come.

If you've reached this far in the article without dozing off, feel free to follow me on Instagram, and Twitter, I also make content on YouTube.