#100DaysToOffload Milestone: The 100th Blog Post

And one hundred.

I have posted 100 blog posts in the last 365 days.

Why? Because I took on this #100DaysToOffload Internet challenge.

My brain, trained on decades of video games, is tuned to enjoy challenges, no questions asked.

But this challenge is very different from those social media challenges that die as fast as they become popular. How?

First, the #100DaysToOffload challenge is not as popular. At least, it is not as popular as it should be.

Create and Learn

I also appreciate that in a world where we consume and consume only, this challenge required me to create. Not once, but a hundred times.

I built Toph in 2015 and continue to work on it. I know what it feels like to see a project grow from the first Git commit to where Toph is today. And I enjoy it.

But when I started writing about the little things I work on, I began to appreciate it more. It allowed me to look at my work in a new light and often through other people’s eyes. The latter, I think, creates this natural way of learning new things.

Take the blog post on exiting gracefully in Go, for example. I have been using the knowledge described in that blog post for several years. Yet, it is when I wrote about it I realized that there are subtle improvements I can make to the code.

I recognized opportunities for improvements in the code both as I was writing the blog post and when others shared feedback for the blog post.

I wrote a blog post on steganography. It outlines how you can hide files within the ZIP file format. I didn’t even know that there was a word (i.e. “steganography”) for it until I was looking for tags for the blog post.

Now that I know that steganography is a thing, I think I have a new hobby.

Being Consistent

But the 100DaysToOffload challenge was not just about creating a hundred blog posts. The challenge required me to do this over a year, which is difficult unless you can teach yourself to be consistent.

I wrote my first ever blog post on December 28, 2013.

In that post, I wrote: “But now that my first post is live, I guess I will have to make it a habit.”

I wrote my second post on January 14, 2014, and third on “August 26, 2014”. Before I started the 100DaysToOffload challenge, I had written nine blog posts in nine years.

While working through the challenge, I realized once again that being consistent at something has an immense effect on the results, often strongly positive.

Although I wasn’t consistent during the whole year, I suppose, in this case, all’s well that ends.

No Matter How Small

The 100DaysToOffload challenge also taught me that even a blog post on the simplest things can be useful to someone else out there.

Funnily enough, in some cases, that someone else can be future-me.

I wrote a blog post on adding icons for Go-built Windows executables. The idea is so trivial. Yet, if my analytics are correct, people find the blog post useful.

A couple of years ago, when adding some code in a project around MongoDB Change Streams, I realized that MongoDB needs to run as a part of a replica set, not in the standalone mode. The size of the replica set can be one.

So I poked around until I figured out how to set up a single node MongoDB replica set with Docker Compose. It took quite some time to get it right. And then I thought about writing it.

To this day, it is one of my many blog posts that people stumble across from search engines regularly.

Finish Line?

I don’t want to look at this 100th blog post for the 100DaysToOffload challenge as a finish line.

Without a challenge, I may not be posting daily. But I want to continue sharing what I learn and continue the habit of writing built through the #100DaysToOffload challenge that I couldn’t form in the nine years before it.

This post is 100th of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.