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I'm learning to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Today is day 115

1542 points by jenniferDewalt 13y ago

valokafor 13y ago
Great Jennifer, you have just greatly inspired me. I will get started, maybe do one site a week instead of a day since I have this thing called full time job! Keep it up
cheez 13y ago
Good on you, your progress is amazing. If you want a job, you'll get it.
anishkothari 13y ago
Brilliant. Good for you! Suggestion: add some contact information in your profile
- jenniferDewalt 13y ago
  Thanks for the tip! I added my email address.
  - anishkothari 13y ago
    You're welcome - let us know what happens after this!
keiferski 13y ago
Wow, this is really inspiring. I see that she's hosting them all on her personal domain, but I have a question, if anyone has an answer. What's the easiest/most cost-effective way to host a large number of sites on different domains? Learn how to use a VPS? Static pages with NearlyFreeSpeech? I've got a zillion ideas (and after seeing this, will be building them soon) but they need to be on separate domains. Paying $5/month or whatever for each is obviously not optimal.
- jaytaylor 13y ago
  Leverage Apache with vhosts if you're dealing with dynamic websites, and if the sites are all static it might be even easier to host in a bunch of S3 buckets.
- tomg 13y ago
  If you're at all familiar with the command line / Linux, then VPS could be an easy way to go if you don't expect a lot of traffic. Nginx is easy to configure for this kind of thing: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11778085/1301376 http://stackoverflow.com/a/11778085/1301376 The minor downside is that you'll be responsible for keeping your server up to date, but with a bit of upfront work you can mostly automate it.
- patrickg_zill 13y ago
  Get a VPS and learn how to use either Nginx and some of its configurable options, or Apache's "mass virtual hosting" mode http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/mass.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/mass.html . TLDR is "create a separate directory for each site with the directory being called the URL of the site" e.g. /var/htdocs/www.domain1.com has the web pages for http://www.domain1.com/ http://www.domain1.com/ .
- sadkingbilly 13y ago
  You'd have to register each domain. For hosting, you could try to find a free plan, like Heroku, and point the domain there. Or you could buy a VPS or dedicated server. I had a Windows dedicated server once for projects like this, but it was just too expensive to keep.
- johnward 13y ago
  Could they all reside on subdomains or are you saying you don't want to pay $5 a month for hosting for each?
- dpeck 13y ago
  Gandi simplehosting is hard to beat if you're hosting a lot of static pages from different domains. $30/year if you've already got domains registered with them. I've used it for a couple of things, and for the cost/realiability/simplicity when using gandi domains (which are granted a bit expensive) Ive been very happy with it.
tdd1 13y ago
Cool! That's DEF fun and creative!! :D
headcanon 13y ago
I suppose the hardest part of doing something like this, at least for me, would be coming up with a list of ideas of exactly what to create - not just coming up with 180 things, but 180 things that I can reasonably expect to accomplish in one day. Did you come up with that list beforehand, or do you decide today what to do tomorrow, or something in between? Some other random questions that come to mind - What's your daily schedule like during this period? How many hours do you typically spend on a single project? Are you also working during this period, or did you save up some money beforehand?
- rogerchucker 13y ago
  Yeah as awesome as this looks, it also feels like a full time commitment is needed.
- jenniferDewalt 13y ago
  Before I started the project I freaked out and wrote down a list of every idea I could think of. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to run out of ideas but I usually get inspired by what I've been working on. I spend about 10 hours a day working on the project which doesn't leave time for much else. Most of that time is spent coding the day's website and I spend about an hour at the end of the day writing the blog post. Monday's start with me writing a bigger post about my thoughts from the previous week.
  - pdenya 13y ago
    I'm extremely impressed by how far you've gotten in this. I've seen a lot of these "create something every day" quests but they're usually in the first few days when posted. 10 hours a day spent on this seems like a huge commitment to me. I clicked the link to your blog but didn't see anything more to the motivations of this project. Have you posted any more details on what made you choose to devote yourself to this non-profit full time endeavor?
    - jenniferDewalt 13y ago
      I had been thinking about how people communicate with each other on the internet and I got really interested in how websites facilitate that communication. I figured learning how to code would be a good way to see how those websites work and maybe even get to help build them myself. I wrote a little about this here - http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/53231496490/week-11-lets-talk http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/53231496490/week-11-lets...
circa 13y ago
Great job! Will stay tuned for the 65 days left!
zaph0d 13y ago
Kudos to you Jennifer. I hope your path inspires many other aspiring programmers.
wellingtons 13y ago
I have to ask: How on earth do you find the time to do this? As much as I'd love to do this in order to get my hands dirty on web development and out of systems, I can't ever fathom having the free time available every day consecutively. I mean, for someone "learn(ing) to code" on Day 1 and by Day 15 doing "Dropping Boxes", it just seems a little far fetched. Obviously you have had a good portion of coding experience and are using -some- level of resources, or you are a savant. I don't mean to sound rude, I just feel like the readers deserve a deeper level of explanation and cited resources, rather than believing you reinvented Conway's Game of Life by day 108. Edit: I have to add that this is all very excellent work and good on you for sticking to your goals so far. Clearly you are a very talented individual. Cheers.
- ultimatedelman 13y ago
  seconded. day 46 you wrote a snake game using canvas manipulation? i call shenanigans.
  - apalmer 13y ago
    I definitely see your point, but from her description she spends 10 hours a day on this excersize. I could see that level of progress given those constraints, 10 hours a day every days for a month and a half is insane dedication. On the other hand that level of dedication seems to indicate that apparently she has some kind of OCD, no disrespect just wild speculation.
    - ultimatedelman 13y ago
      i'm not saying that this feat of creating 180 websites in 180 days is impossible. it's highly improbable and takes a very unique mix of dedication, intellect, funding, and, well, nothing better to do for half a year, but that's for someone with a background in coding. my beef is that this person is claiming to come from a completely non-programming background and has not read any books or taken any courses. i don't care if you spend 24 hours a day coding, you can't write a program as complex as MS Paint in canvas in a month if you've never written a line of code in your life. There are just too many intermediate steps missing and progress is just too fast. I would love to be wrong about this, but seeing as I've been doing this for a really long time, this just smells funny to me.
pwelch 13y ago
As someone else mentioned, I think the hardest part is coming up with idea. Most of these are really cool! Awesome job.
mehulkar 13y ago
This is awesome. Reminds me of the girl who learned to dance in one year by recording herself every day. Also reminds me of Seth Godin who recommends starting the day by producing rather than consuming and follows the practice by writing a new blog post every day, without fail. Consistency is so hugely important. Quality is born from quantity.
- it_learnses 13y ago
  "Start the day by producing instead of consuming." Sounds wonderful. I'm going to try and live by that. Thanks for this :)
  - mehulkar 13y ago
    Good luck. My longest streak doing this was 6 days I think.
  - garybizzle 13y ago
    but i love breakfast.
    - jimhart3000 13y ago
      Then cook it before you eat it.
      - garybizzle 13y ago
        genius
        pbhjpbhj 13y ago
        But don't "consume" any energy cooking it?
- pakitan 13y ago
  > Quality is born from quantity Could be. But Seth Godin is hardly the living proof. In fact, I've stopped reading his blog long time ago precisely because of the sheer number of "I need to write about something today" type of posts. I much prefer when people write when they have something really meaningful to say. Which is what Paul Graham usually does, for example. I guess that's a case for "quality breeds quality".
hydralist 13y ago
this is inspiring
calebhc 13y ago
This is so awesome! Thanks for sharing your work. :) I really love the Window Master!
carlosgg 13y ago
Bravo!! I really liked this: "I think the best way to learn is to solve problems that you actually have. This is the primary reason I decided not to follow a course or textbook. By following my own path, I can tackle new concepts and problems in the most logical order possible, which is precisely when I have them. When I have questions, I look them up on Stack Overflow. If I need to make a big jump, like starting a new language or platform, I’ll bootstrap off of a textbook only until I get off the ground."
- it_learnses 13y ago
  I've started many times to do projects or follow books or lectures, and it's very hard to stay disciplined. However, once you start on your problem, I agree that it's probably a good idea to look at some lectures/books/blogs to take a look at what's available in terms of technologies and practices to save you time and money.
cocoflunchy 13y ago
This one is awesome: http://jenniferdewalt.com/song_machine/page http://jenniferdewalt.com/song_machine/page
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zerr 13y ago
  Interesting how that is implemented. Didn't quite get from viewing page source. I mean, where is js?
  - ultimatedelman 13y ago
    at some point, she learned about minification and http requests and concatenated all her scripts into one "application" script.
    - gknoy 13y ago
      I can appreciate the reasons for doing so, but as someone interested in reading her code for how she did it, it might be nicer to unbundle and not minify them. Then again, thanks for the point about her Github repo. It's probably clearer to just go read that. :)
    - cgcardona 13y ago
      It looks like the site is built with Ruby on Rails. Rails has a feature called 'The Asset Pipeline'[1] which handles concatenation, minification, and compression [1] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html
  - wcy 13y ago
    Her site is on github. Most of the song machine source appears to be at https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/websites/song_machine_page.js https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/blob/master/app...
- 13y ago
franze 13y ago
i like day 114 http://jenniferdewalt.com/image_palette/page http://jenniferdewalt.com/image_palette/page was looking for an online quick to user color picker just yesterday
realrocker 13y ago
Wow. Unimaginable patience.
dantheman 13y ago
Super Impressive, dedicating the time to accomplish this remarkable.
txutxu 13y ago
I take my hat off by personal challenge and the technical side of the project. But I put more kudos on "publishing it". I'm a self-taught which now can say I'm more than a decade in the industry, but I think I could never publish my "learning" projects because maybe I'm ashamed of their quality. I think what you have do is nice, and more important is well presented for others to see. So you maybe encouraging others to do the same. That is the spirit. Great.
mjhea0 13y ago
i'd love to hear more about the resources you are utilizing. plus - how do you find time to work on this for 10 hours/day!?
- mjhea0 13y ago
  you could really help a lot of people out by writing a basic curriculum!
sonabinu 13y ago
This is inspirational ... find time to dedicate to learning something new
cgcardona 13y ago
Really great idea Jennifer! This is the kind of initiative and creativity that will surely land you multiple job opportunities. It reminds me of the steps which I took to transition into working on software professionally full time. I came to programming relatively late in life when I was 26 and found out that my wife was expecting a baby. The sudden change facing my wife and I made me take a hard look at my skill set to decide how quickly I could provide for us. I decided that my interest in setting up wordpress installs as well as tinkering with Photoshop/Illustrator was the surest, safest, and quickest path to a successful career and decided then and there that within 6 months I would have a job as a junior web developer. To help accelerate this I signed up at my local community college for courses related to getting a web design certificate. Ultimately I took 2 semesters (1 of which was a compressed summer semester) of classes including CS-1, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL. Soon I began to get the feeling that school was moving too slowly. I had joined the W3C HTML5 Working Group and was also participating in the WHATWG and started to realize that I was learning much more by hacking on code in the evenings than I was in class. During this time I started to create a portfolio showcasing new HTML5 APIs as they would become available across different browsers. Mostly I did this out of my own passion for web standards and wanting to understand the most cutting edge APIs as soon as they dropped. However this portfolio soon became incredibly valuable with regards to landing a job. During the second semester I got the chance to interview for a local android dev shop (this is in Santa Cruz, CA). I got the job but didn't find Java to be a good fit for my skills at the time and after a couple of months transitioned to another local dev shop. This company was a rails shop building an app for Walmart's internal network. I got the job based on my HTML5 knowledge and soon found myself learning rails. Around this time I made the decision to quit going to school and to focus full time on my job. I was at this job for about a year until the company unfortunately went out of business. Since I left that job I've spent a year and a half at trulia.com where I was on the mobile team building m.trulia.com, Trulia's native windows 8 app, and the suite of webservices powering Trulia's native iOS/Android/Windows apps. Currently I'm at cardfree.com where I'm working with ruby on rails. The reason I posted this tale is to encourage you to continue what you're doing! When I look back at my short but exciting career I notice that though I feel fortunate to have gotten a couple of semesters of training at a junior college it was mostly always the projects and initiatives which I undertook in my personal and spare time which ended up being the most valuable for me. There is so much opportunity and demand in the consumer web and electronics space right now that showing this initiative and creating such a strong portfolio will surely land you multiple job offers if that's what you are looking for. Either way excellent work and I wish you the best of luck going forward!
deleted 13y ago
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sivers 13y ago
There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here: === The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. === Advance congratulations to Jennifer. This is amazing.
- it_learnses 13y ago
  Wow! that's happened with me so many times. I'll start on a project and I'll always theorize all the best features, and then best technologies to use and I end up switching so many technologies and then going on a tangential curve to learn them, and then I eventually quit the project :(
  - 14113 13y ago
    Ditto. A common problem for me is starting a project, then becoming scared that I'll be inadequate, and not complete it properly. This causes me to give up on the project, and I lose out on any experience I might have got. Because I've failed to complete the project, I feel even WORSE going into the next one. It's a vicious cycle.
    - ahmadss 13y ago
      Consider reading a book called "The Now Habit". The author discusses fear of success/failure and the inability to finish projects, and deems that these fears are what cause us to procrastinate. Then he provides a plan/approach/framework to overcome these fears.
zinssmeister 13y ago
This is pretty cool, but I think spending a bit more time with a bigger project instead of doing 180 small ones would be more beneficial. But maybe her goal is to jump into bigger/long term stuff after the 180 days. Either way, congrats for getting out there and building stuff!
- freyr 13y ago
  Keep in mind, she's starting from scratch, and her goal is to learn fundamentals of programming, not project management. Managing an large, interconnected project is a formidable task in itself. She's made a pretty strong case for starting small, managing scope, and keeping realistic expectations.
exizt88 13y ago
Ah, but note that Mondrian uses stripes of varying width -- it adds a lot to the piece. Consider trying to make the width individual stripes changeable. This might even provide even some insight into Mondrian's art.
DanBC 13y ago
This is amazing. It's inspiring. I like the rules you set for yourself - a blog post to accompany every website, and releasing the code on github. It's important that people know the WWW is not out of their reach, and that they can create stuff. This post, and Neocities, strongly feed that "democratisation" of the Internet. Next it might be a nice idea to do 4 websites, one a month, but polish them so they're standards compliant, as accessible as possible, etc.
chatmasta 13y ago
Wow. Impressive dedication, and even more impressive creativity.
kavithag 13y ago
Very inspiring! Keep up the good work!
lucb1e 13y ago
I thought you said "websites". You mean pages with a single purpose. It's a good idea though and you probably learn a lot from it, but I wouldn't say that I'd made 180 websites after completing this.
dataduck 13y ago
Jennifer, you mentioned you weren't following any kind of course - how did you decide what to build on the next day?
RakshaC 13y ago
Really Wow! Quite inspiring.
thejacenxpress 13y ago
I was leaving the film industry and unemployed for a year. I only did about 4-5 hours a day (had $$ saved) and got far enough to get a great job, but wow. I like that you're not just BS-ing 180 days, but actually challenging yourself.
devgutt 13y ago
I wish I had time to do similar approach solely to learn new things using HN: Hacker News University.
booop 13y ago
In a similar vein, here's a thread of a complete rookie starting from scratch who turned into a fantastic artist by drawing a sketch every day : http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870 http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870 I guess this works for learning programming too.
- jianshen 13y ago
  I've always loved that thread because there's such a huge history of progress. It'd be interesting to see the OP come back in a year to implement one of these exercises and compare the quality of the code from where she started.
jagan123 13y ago
This is crazy!
ansdkfus13 13y ago
This story indeed is very inspiring. I'm a business major turned front-end designer. I worked as a financial analyst for a semi-conductor company for two years and realized I want a career that fosters my creative side. Working with Excel, though I got very good at it :P, all day long made my day very dull and monotonous. I got my husband to teach me how to code (he's a CS major, working as a product manager for a SF company). Now I am fairly proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS, HTML, and Javascript. Then I made a Python program which analyzes the proper excess inventory to keep for the semiconductor company I worked for, which got me a lot of recognition (the program was prob elementary level and messy but got a credit for being a financial analyst that can code). I quit my day job and I'm working on my startup, for which I'm doing all the front end coding and some of back-end coding as well. Also relocating to SF to pursue this new found passion. I wish the best of luck to Jennifer and other people like her.
karolisd 13y ago
This is inspiring and I'm not sure why. It's not technically impressive, there's far more impressive tutorials and snippets a single Google search away. It's something about the persistence and a desire to learn and improve. It's about the beginner's mind and artistic whimsy. I get to see someone's thought process expressed through a hundred tiny websites.
xmmx 13y ago
I want to learn from your code, but it looks like it's all hidden somewhere?
zwieback 13y ago
Fantastic and I'm also glad to see that most of the comments are positive. I was almost afraid to click on the comments link.
austinrory 13y ago
this is super smart. also, it gives me a good guide for ideas for the sites i want to build as i'm learning to code. THANKS!
jumby 13y ago
Is fizz buzz broken? A random number is nice, but what if not divisible by 3 or 5 - what do I enter? Example: I got 559.
alcuadrado 13y ago
To be honest, as soon as I read the title I thought "but if you force yourself to deliver something new every day you want have enough time to actually learn new stuff in between", and you proved me wrong. Congratulations!
jbp 13y ago
This kind of dedication is inspiring. From http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/51616616313/day-58-explosions http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/51616616313/day-58-explo... : "Tomorrow I head to Pennsylvania to host a bridal shower and bachelorette weekend for my sister. Between the pre-wedding festivities and visiting with family, I’m going to be pretty limited on time for building websites. But, the show must go on and I am excited to see what kind of goodness I can create under pressure." Congratulations Jennifer.
javadi82 13y ago
Thanks so much for posting this. This is the most inspiring "show HN" I've seen here.
wcy 13y ago
My plan is to learn how to code by reading the code for 180 of Jennifer Dewalt's websites in 180 days.
- vicks711 13y ago
  Not a good plan. If you want to learn how to code by reading code read high quality code on Github.
- adrian_pop 13y ago
  Not a good plan.
stevewilhelm 13y ago
In the next couple of weeks you might want to look at secure authentication and authorized resource access, scaling, sessions, cross-platform issues, internationalization, adaptive design, etc. Also might want to revisit some of your existing websites to get some exposure to refactoring, bug fixing, prioritizing feature requests, test based development, performance profiling, etc.
espadagroup 13y ago
Finally someone posting a challenge they're undertaking when they have at least accomplished already some of it. I hate seeing people announce that they are about to do something. This is much much better.
freyr 13y ago
So many hurt egos in this thread. If you think what she's done is impossible, have you ever devoted 70/hrs a week to a personal endeavor for 6 straight months? Would you have the willpower and perseverance to stay committed and focused? Also, these are cool sites, infused with a lot of creativity and a refined aesthetic sense, but it's not as if she's claimed to have written an OS or compiler in 115 days. Much of the javascript code is covered extensively in brief online tutorials. Maybe, given 10 hours, you couldn't ingest a tutorial and put your own spin on the concept, but thinking that nobody else could do that is a bit arrogant.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  The solid-block-of-learning strategy is way less impressive to me than the person who works a 40ish hour a week job then comes home and does many more hours of their own project for moths or years. The want to zone out is strong and after a day of crappy and mind numbing work, beating the laziness is harder I think.
  - freyr 13y ago
    > The solid-block-of-learning strategy is way less impressive to me than the person who works a 40ish hour a week job then comes home and does many more hours of their own project for moths or years. You might also say the guy who uses a lawnmower is way less impressive than the guy who cuts his grass with a nail clipper. But I don't want to be the guy with the nail clipper. Believe me, I know the feeling of wanting to zone out after a long day of work, a long commute, etc. I let it sideline my ambition for a decade. She found a way around it. I certainly wouldn't discredit her for that.
    - mindrag 13y ago
      If I could ask, how did you find your own way around that feeling?
      - noAlchemy 13y ago
        I know I'm not the GP, but might be able to be some use here. Context: always wanted to do a maths PhD, but ended up stuck running a small business (50-70 hrs/wk) for a number of years. Managed to keep studying through this and have just landed a PhD. Suggestions: 1. You'll be working while you're tired. So your work won't be as good, you won't make optimal decisions 100% of the time, sometimes you will just underperform relative to you at your best. Accept this - your work is still better than all the work you weren't doing before. Slow progress is always better than no progress. Key here is creating space that's just for work. I have a table which is just for studying, and a logon that's only for studying, which actually really helps. 2. Pick a course of study and stick to it. There's a tradeoff here - for a given area of study, you want to choose the best course for you but don't want to waste time trying several different things (likewise languages, frameworks, etc). Pick 2-3 and whittle down quickly (I choose 2-3 MOOCs or textbooks, then whittle down using the first chapter over a week or two). There may be a slightly better course out there you don't know about, but it really won't make a difference. 3. If your intention is to become a professional, pick a specialisation quickly (even almost randomly if you have to). No-one would give me the time of day when I was just generically interested in 'maths' but as soon as I picked a sub-area and started to learn about it, people took me seriously. (Obvious caveats apply about over-specialisation) 4. Start talking to other people. You really need to have done 2 & 3, otherwise you won't have any progress to show, and nothing to talk about, but once you've done enough to talk sensibly to others (which might be less than you think) then you'll be more engaged and less likely to drop out/quit. 5. Accept your limitations. Sometimes work/life will take over - sometimes you can make sacrifices and continue to get work done, sometimes doing this would be too painful and you'll need to take a break to get things in order. The thing here is just to show up. If I had to choose one sentence from all of this to give as advice, it'd be the last one. Just show up.
akivabamberger 13y ago
Great idea. Way to go, Jennifer.
maxmem 13y ago
Who has the time or money to teach yourself to code in 180 days?
sanjkris 13y ago
Just made my middle-school kids' summer break more interesting. If you take all this js knowledge and add android/ios skills, you can increase your hourly fees by 10X. I myself would hire you for my mobile suite of apps.
eat 13y ago
These comments are infuriating, but not unexpected. So many people who have likely wasted their last 115 days attempting to find every fault with someone who clearly hasn't. OP: Excellent work, and keep it up. I hope you take the criticisms and disbelief for what they truly are: incontrovertible evidence that you're doing something very right.
- bsklaroff 13y ago
  If I were Jennifer I'd be flattered by the comments. It must feel great to have produced so much quality work that HN naysayers tell you what you did is impossible after you've already done it.
  - unimpressive 13y ago
    This, when I used to make Halo maps I would often be accused of modding the game to make them. I always took this as a compliment.
jqueryin 13y ago
This is great and all, but I do have to call BS on no previous coding experience. Perhaps she had plenty of HTML experience and wouldn't regard that as coding experience. If you look at her early examples, even on something like day 3, you find the following in the source: * Inclusion of a CSS reset stylesheet * Inclusion of jQuery 1.9.1 * Usage of HTML5 footer tag * Inclusion of the HTML5 shiv JS If this wasn't boilerplate HTML being used, I have no idea where a beginner would know these three things on day 3. Perhaps just stumbling upon the right project? Also noteworthy is the inclusion of an external JS file for loading Google Analytics. Most people have no idea what this is or how to set it up
ValG 13y ago
An additional anecdote comes from Jerry Seinfeld, (comedian). He says that his goal when he got into comedy (and still to this day) is to write jokes every day. Create a chain of joke writing and keep track of it in a physical way (in his example, a calendar that he marks off with an X every time he sits down to write). You create momentum that you don't want to break, and even though you might not be writing good jokes (good code, etc...) every day, there is still improvement going on. [1] All anecdote, but it seems to point to the fact that the value of iteration on DOING is more valuable than iteration on PLANNING. (i.e. plan a little bit, and do a lot). [1] http://www.writersstore.com/dont-break-the-chain-jerry-seinfeld/ http://www.writersstore.com/dont-break-the-chain-jerry-seinf...
rubyclown 13y ago
It's 180 HTML & Javascript PAGES, not 180 WEBSITES! Big Difference. Nevertheless, congratulations on your dedication.
dimadima 13y ago
I'd love to know how you beasted Git and deployment sufficiently and did your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... 16th project every day, deploying from day 1. How did you go from having zero Git knowledge to deploying to a web server 10 hours later?
tourbillonfunk 13y ago
Wow, a huge congratulations to you! I'm just starting my journey to become a programmer and am dedicating the same amount of time. You're dedication, patience and work ethic really inspire me! Awesome job on all of your projects.
progx 13y ago
Cant wait until Number 180 when you build a complete Web Framework ;-)
bobwaycott 13y ago
This is awesome, Jennifer. Keep up the good work!
Abundnce10 13y ago
It looks like the majority of her Github commits are happening during 6pm-12am http://imagebin.org/265513 http://imagebin.org/265513
ron1986 13y ago
Great Work! Keep Going !!
eagler 13y ago
Congratulations! I'm impressed how you just got started rather than waiting for "the perfect moment." Your persistence and progress are inspiring. Also, your work doubles as a collection of engaging content ideas for teaching beginning programming :) Thank you!
maxisnow 13y ago
How cool! Keep it up!
ekr 13y ago
I'm going to ignore all the malicious comments about how fraudulent this is. This is an amazing achievement, and it reminds me of a much better way of improving your skills. Last time I wanted to build a ray-tracer, I starting using the PBR book, and then started learning about Fourier series and transforms, about signals etc. This of depth-first aquisition of knowledge is not very adequate for the average human mind, whose curiosity and motivation are much better served by achieving many short and tangible results, a so-called feedback loop. Seeing Jennifer and her progress, I'm determined to start a similar project: 1 demo (not necessarily 4k/64k) coded in asm/GLSL per week. That's after I actually finish writing my hobby OS, which is being done in the same DFS fashion (started reading Tanenbaum's book on Minix, it has plenty of references).
iguana 13y ago
This is awesome, humbling, and inspiring at the same time. (There were 180 comments on this story, now there are 181)
fnbaptiste 13y ago
This is awesome. When I read the title I was expecting a bunch of exercises in layout with different slick UIs and such. I was very surprised by how creative each of these were. They're very fun to go through. And in the end, when it comes to getting a job, this kind of stuff looks way better than "went to school, got this degree".
jorgecastillo 13y ago
I am really impressed this gal sure has a promising future as a software developer. I must also say this made me a little sad, she has done in days what I haven't been able to do in years.
DarrenMills 13y ago
It's a great way that learning to code can produce a ton of content and experimental innovation. Code Academy (and others) listen up: What if everyone produced content while learning to code?
- miguelindurain 13y ago
  that's a great idea! It's actually similar to the idea behind duolingo.com People produce translations while learning a language
shire 13y ago
Wow this must really time consuming. Really great work. Inspirational
akurilin 13y ago
Basically, work a lot. Make sure there's always a chunk of work that's new and challenging, a form of deliberate practice. Also make sure there's a chunk of work that's reinforcing what you already know until it becomes second nature. Rinse and repeat. Kaizen.
mrcactu5 13y ago
execution
auggierose 13y ago
So many envious comments here, ridiculous. Jennifer, this is really inspiring stuff!
amerika_blog 13y ago
I wouldn't launch this kind of project without some kind of ace up my sleeve. I'd either prepare it in advance, vamp it all from the "tutorials," or have some backup code somewhere. That would be necessary to avoid having a mundane interruption cause the project to fail.
jbranchaud 13y ago
Jennifer, I've skimmed through a handful of your projects and they are all very creative, fun and thoughtful. I'd be excited to see what you could do with d3.js (http://d3js.org/ http://d3js.org/). Check it out if you haven't already!
keefe 13y ago
180 iterations of the same website in 180 days and you have a company :]
kwal0203 13y ago
Thanks
donaq 13y ago
You are super awesome. I have been programming for years and I still don't know how to do some of the stuff you've done for your websites. I'm sure I could easily learn how to, but then it's easy for me because I have the advantage of years of experience. To be able to get to where you are within 3 months is astounding to me and that tells me something about the validity of your approach, so I'm gonna shamelessly rip you off the next time I need to learn a new skill. Somebody hire this person!
kenster07 13y ago
I have mixed emotions, not about the author, but the implications of this thread. It is great that she shows such dedication to the craft. But has dedication to a craft really become so rare that it is worthy of 900 plus points on hacker news? I know countless software engineers who work their tails off every waking hour, myself included. Do we all deserve hacker news posts? Or should we elevate our expectations?
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  I don't think there's any real value in HN points, so you're basically asking if it's worthy of something worthless. It's just an indicator of interest by the HN community, not a gift of any worth. That being said, I'm sure a decent chunk of the 900 votes were from software devs, many of whom are probably ones that work their tails off. It's possible there is something more intriguing than the dedication alone. One thing I find interesting is the head-first/all-in nature of the project.
jmtame 13y ago
I looked through your comment history to see if you already answered and couldn't find it. What happened when you got stuck? I'd suspect there were points where you couldn't figure something out; it tends to happen when you become frustrated and you have to take a break. You mentioned that you had no previous programming experience. How much time did you spend learning before you created the first app on day 1? I ask because this goes against the pattern I've observed in most students. I was involved in starting Bloc, which is an online programming bootcamp. I think the #1 value proposition is having a person there to help when you get unstuck. It's fascinating to see you overcome the learning curve on your own which affects most people trying to learn. Just so I can fully understand: did you have any human interaction or assistance during this entire time? That to me is the most impressive part of this. A lot of us had TAs, professors, group projects where we worked closely with others. I don't know a single person in my own network who has learned to program on their own without any human help. Hope it doesn't come across as if I'm belittling what you've done or seem skeptical, this is really impressive!
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gnus 13y ago
Jennifer, you are just plain amazing. You are my inspiration.
j45 13y ago
How admirable, good for you. I don't have anything more to add than my sincere appreciation for seeing what you're doing, it's a fantastic example.
atmosx 13y ago
Congrats, it's amazing what you have achieved.
t0dd 13y ago
Very impressive. It reminds one that complaining about "too much work" is often just a poor excuse for petrifying in a niche of self-satisfaction and comfort. I can't read all of this, browse what you've accomplished in so little time, and doubt the feeling great things are destined for you. Congrats!
throwaway3030 13y ago
I'm a software engineer. I love this style of learning. However, if the idea of building 180 different websites in 180 days sounds so unappealing to me I actually winced when I read the title, should I find another career? (real question) I'd rather do the opposite thing, sell my laptop and do 180 drawings or sculptures in 180 days.
alexdowad 13y ago
Awesome stuff, Jennifer! Congratulations!
whbk 13y ago
From her Facebook, September 2009: "If you don't know already, I've created an iPhone app! I've been working really hard on this and have had lots of fun taking pictures of myself and my friends. Oh, what it does is gives everyone in the picture a HOT or COLD rating. The app is called ruHOT and is available for download for the iPhone and Android phones. Check it out!" So yeah, highly doubt this is truly her first rodeo. Cool project(s) nonetheless and impressive dedication.
- ryan-allen 13y ago
  Interesting sleuthing. Maybe it's just exceptionally well targeted self-advertising. I know I'll get creamed by playing the gender card, but if this were a guy, would we be so coy to call them out on the fact that 'this ain't your first time'. I think if anything this kind of misinformation regarding 'the possible output for a beginner' is actually discouraging to beginning developers. I do think this experiment it self-serving. I have been doing web for around 10 years and it would be no cakewalk (albeit not impossible, if I had the time) to come up with a new novel idea every day for 180 days, and certainly as a beginner this kind of output is the most improbable thing I have ever seen (I have taught a few smart people how to get started and it takes a long time). So, do we play along and misinform all the other true beginners or do we call out this Red Herring? If we want more women to be welcome in tech they have to be held to the same kind of standards (honesty and ability). We can't let one individual get away with this kind of dishonesty because of gender. And if you don't think this kind of manipulation exists, you should go read Reddit sometime (it's full of stuff like this, you can turn a picture of a random puppy into massive attention by saying 'look at who I adopted from an abusive home! I will love him for ever!'). Think about it people! EDIT: The projects Jen has done are cool and interesting, no doubt. And the 'just f'ing do it' idea is even better. But can't possibly be programming beginner. EDIT 2: I probably shouldn't be such a bastard, but anyway. Good job. Just be honest where you are coming from and you'll get deeper respect, I think is my point.
  - James_Duval 13y ago
    I created a game in Actionscript 2.0 back in 2009. I started to program in around November of 2011. Being able to cobble together an app or what-have-you is very different from programming, I think. I would not call what I did back then programming. I even wrote a couple of follow-up games which used a tile-based map system and pathfinding but didn't store nodes on the map as variables - the game calculated the location of the nodes each time they were to be used. That's hideous. I'd also point out that the vastness of the internet's resources should not be underestimated. I could create something awesome in 10 hours using Codecademy as a reference and generic tutorials I found using Google. The problem for me would be finding 10 hours to do this in. I do not think that this is a deliberate attempt to deceive as much as it is a sense the person feels that the person is 'not a proper programmer'. Hell, if I created a similar project now, after completing coursera/proglang and coursera/algorithm-design-and-analysis and working with web design for about a year and a half, I would still call it "teaching myself to code", because there is so much to learn I'm barely dipping my toe in the water.
jaekwon 13y ago
I tried to splode a bacon bit, but it would not splode. Very disappointed. But love the execution. Good job and keep going!
marincounty 13y ago
Steven King vs. Vladimar Nabrakov
Nodex 13y ago
You're trying to tell us that you've learned from scratch having never written code before in your life? And in 180 days using tricks like minifying/concatting all assets in your js, adding csrf tokens and many other tricks that a lot of very seasoned web developers don't often use? Pull the other one.... Nice way to get on HN and to the top though - I take my hat off to you. Also. 180 single pages is not 180 websites
bencollier49 13y ago
Incidentally, does that remind anyone of the "Cascade Cassette 50"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_50 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_50 The work is of profoundly higher quality, though, I just mean in terms of volume!
styrmis 13y ago
This is really great! There are quite possibly many better ways to spend 180 days if you wanted to make money (#1 would probably be completing every Rails tutorial available) but I don't think that is important here. Rather, I find her approach inspiring and it's something that can be applied to any endeavour. One nice thing that she will have, even if she doesn't make it through the full 180 is a record of her earliest creations through to her latest. Like when keeping a journal she'll be able to refer to it when she's feeling low and see the progress she's made, and she'll have a record of what she's done that transcends her memory. At my first job I was lucky enough to report directly to the Technical Director of the company who took the time to mentor me on what it means to be a good software engineer. The first thing he had me do is to keep an engineer's journal. The benefits of this would only become clear a few weeks down the line but clear it was: I would encounter a problem I knew I had solved before but couldn't quite recall the solution to; I would flip back to find my notes and there it would be. Fast forward a few months, then a year and the value received from this simple act of keeping an organised journal far exceeded my expectations. I have since kept the habit going but I feel that more can be done here. On one level you can keep notes for yourself and improve your own productivity. A level up would be to write those notes up on an internal wiki. One level up further and you've polished them into material you can publish to a wider community. One level up again you can inspire others to do the same through your efforts. One such effort that I have seen (outside of Jennifer's) that I think is completely worth anyone's time to explore is Journey of an Absolute Rookie: Paintings and Sketches (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870 http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870), 10 full years of recorded progress of a beginning artist that blew my mind. Warning: you may lose a lot of time to that forum thread! There is something beautiful and powerful in things that have been worked on and tended to for years, things that cannot be rushed no matter what: the only way to have 10 years of recorded progress today is to have started 10 years ago and to have kept it up for the duration. What a present to give to yourself!
abinop 13y ago
Dear Jennifer, something tells me this will be the most difficult of the 180 days. If all this buzz does not distruct you, nothing will.
ab21 13y ago
Reminds me of http://danceinayear.com http://danceinayear.com
gabeguz 13y ago
Wow. This is inspiring. I've been programming for years, and don't think I'd be able to create something new every day for 180 days. Major props.
happypeter 13y ago
Amazing story, love it. Yes it's all about building wonderful things. I've been doing one screencast per week since 2011, I have to say it's really really lots of fun.
- ngoel36 13y ago
  happypeter: Would love to hear about what type of screencasts you're building, my company (https://www.bitcast.io https://www.bitcast.io) is looking for the best screencasters we can find. Feel free to reach out at nikhil at bitcast.io.
rXoX 13y ago
This is all great and stuff, but how does this person keep a roof over her head while she does this little thing that's so cute and inspirational? How are the bills getting paid?
barlet 13y ago
This is great. - she is learning to code - she works hard - she is creative with her ideas - everyday - and she is communicating very well - and getting better at it.
rdouble 13y ago
Did you pre-plan the ideas for the websites? When doing art, I used to set goals like "do 30 drawings in a month." However, I've found that I just draw the same stuff over and over again if I leave it at that. I have to actually make a theme (draw 30 plants) and even get a detailed list (draw a jade plant, a hydrangea, etc) in order to actually make any progress. I am curious if you did any planning like this regarding the choice of sites you made?
Tycho 13y ago
I've thought of doing this before. Make one attempt every day, and see it through. Not just for websites but for other skills like songwriting, drawing, short-story writing, and also other types of programming. Needless to say I never went through with it, but it's good to see someone who has. Taking songwriting as an example, what's interesting to me is that basically anyone can try it. Sit down with a note pad, think of a tune, and make a verse-chorus-verse-chorus song (chords and riffs are optional extras). No doubt people like Paul McCartney do try this every day, but then there's the vast majority of people who never make the attempt once in their life, despite their being no real barriers.
dwdwzzz 13y ago
i'm curious what kind tools are you using.
smooradian 13y ago
I have a new hero.
vinhnx 13y ago
Way to go, Jennifer. Best wishes for you!
apathetic 13y ago
Hi, what day-to-day tools did you uses to create these? I wish I did something like this too instead of just playing all day :(
vickytnz 13y ago
Great idea. One minor quibble though: it's 180 webpages or webapps for me at least. I'd say that websites require full infrastructure etc.

1542 points by jenniferDewalt 13y ago

Great Jennifer, you have just greatly inspired me. I will get started, maybe do one site a week instead of a day since I have this thing called full time job! Keep it up

cheez 13y ago

Good on you, your progress is amazing. If you want a job, you'll get it.

anishkothari 13y ago

Brilliant. Good for you! Suggestion: add some contact information in your profile

jenniferDewalt 13y ago
Thanks for the tip! I added my email address.
- anishkothari 13y ago
  You're welcome - let us know what happens after this!

keiferski 13y ago

Wow, this is really inspiring. I see that she's hosting them all on her personal domain, but I have a question, if anyone has an answer. What's the easiest/most cost-effective way to host a large number of sites on different domains? Learn how to use a VPS? Static pages with NearlyFreeSpeech? I've got a zillion ideas (and after seeing this, will be building them soon) but they need to be on separate domains. Paying $5/month or whatever for each is obviously not optimal.

jaytaylor 13y ago
Leverage Apache with vhosts if you're dealing with dynamic websites, and if the sites are all static it might be even easier to host in a bunch of S3 buckets.
tomg 13y ago
If you're at all familiar with the command line / Linux, then VPS could be an easy way to go if you don't expect a lot of traffic. Nginx is easy to configure for this kind of thing: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11778085/1301376 http://stackoverflow.com/a/11778085/1301376 The minor downside is that you'll be responsible for keeping your server up to date, but with a bit of upfront work you can mostly automate it.
patrickg_zill 13y ago
Get a VPS and learn how to use either Nginx and some of its configurable options, or Apache's "mass virtual hosting" mode http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/mass.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/mass.html . TLDR is "create a separate directory for each site with the directory being called the URL of the site" e.g. /var/htdocs/www.domain1.com has the web pages for http://www.domain1.com/ http://www.domain1.com/ .
sadkingbilly 13y ago
You'd have to register each domain. For hosting, you could try to find a free plan, like Heroku, and point the domain there. Or you could buy a VPS or dedicated server. I had a Windows dedicated server once for projects like this, but it was just too expensive to keep.
johnward 13y ago
Could they all reside on subdomains or are you saying you don't want to pay $5 a month for hosting for each?
dpeck 13y ago
Gandi simplehosting is hard to beat if you're hosting a lot of static pages from different domains. $30/year if you've already got domains registered with them. I've used it for a couple of things, and for the cost/realiability/simplicity when using gandi domains (which are granted a bit expensive) Ive been very happy with it.

tdd1 13y ago

Cool! That's DEF fun and creative!! :D

headcanon 13y ago

I suppose the hardest part of doing something like this, at least for me, would be coming up with a list of ideas of exactly what to create - not just coming up with 180 things, but 180 things that I can reasonably expect to accomplish in one day. Did you come up with that list beforehand, or do you decide today what to do tomorrow, or something in between? Some other random questions that come to mind - What's your daily schedule like during this period? How many hours do you typically spend on a single project? Are you also working during this period, or did you save up some money beforehand?

rogerchucker 13y ago
Yeah as awesome as this looks, it also feels like a full time commitment is needed.
jenniferDewalt 13y ago
Before I started the project I freaked out and wrote down a list of every idea I could think of. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to run out of ideas but I usually get inspired by what I've been working on. I spend about 10 hours a day working on the project which doesn't leave time for much else. Most of that time is spent coding the day's website and I spend about an hour at the end of the day writing the blog post. Monday's start with me writing a bigger post about my thoughts from the previous week.
- pdenya 13y ago
  I'm extremely impressed by how far you've gotten in this. I've seen a lot of these "create something every day" quests but they're usually in the first few days when posted. 10 hours a day spent on this seems like a huge commitment to me. I clicked the link to your blog but didn't see anything more to the motivations of this project. Have you posted any more details on what made you choose to devote yourself to this non-profit full time endeavor?
  - jenniferDewalt 13y ago
    I had been thinking about how people communicate with each other on the internet and I got really interested in how websites facilitate that communication. I figured learning how to code would be a good way to see how those websites work and maybe even get to help build them myself. I wrote a little about this here - http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/53231496490/week-11-lets-talk http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/53231496490/week-11-lets...

circa 13y ago

Great job! Will stay tuned for the 65 days left!

zaph0d 13y ago

Kudos to you Jennifer. I hope your path inspires many other aspiring programmers.

wellingtons 13y ago

I have to ask: How on earth do you find the time to do this? As much as I'd love to do this in order to get my hands dirty on web development and out of systems, I can't ever fathom having the free time available every day consecutively. I mean, for someone "learn(ing) to code" on Day 1 and by Day 15 doing "Dropping Boxes", it just seems a little far fetched. Obviously you have had a good portion of coding experience and are using -some- level of resources, or you are a savant. I don't mean to sound rude, I just feel like the readers deserve a deeper level of explanation and cited resources, rather than believing you reinvented Conway's Game of Life by day 108. Edit: I have to add that this is all very excellent work and good on you for sticking to your goals so far. Clearly you are a very talented individual. Cheers.

ultimatedelman 13y ago
seconded. day 46 you wrote a snake game using canvas manipulation? i call shenanigans.
- apalmer 13y ago
  I definitely see your point, but from her description she spends 10 hours a day on this excersize. I could see that level of progress given those constraints, 10 hours a day every days for a month and a half is insane dedication. On the other hand that level of dedication seems to indicate that apparently she has some kind of OCD, no disrespect just wild speculation.
  - ultimatedelman 13y ago
    i'm not saying that this feat of creating 180 websites in 180 days is impossible. it's highly improbable and takes a very unique mix of dedication, intellect, funding, and, well, nothing better to do for half a year, but that's for someone with a background in coding. my beef is that this person is claiming to come from a completely non-programming background and has not read any books or taken any courses. i don't care if you spend 24 hours a day coding, you can't write a program as complex as MS Paint in canvas in a month if you've never written a line of code in your life. There are just too many intermediate steps missing and progress is just too fast. I would love to be wrong about this, but seeing as I've been doing this for a really long time, this just smells funny to me.

pwelch 13y ago

As someone else mentioned, I think the hardest part is coming up with idea. Most of these are really cool! Awesome job.

mehulkar 13y ago

This is awesome. Reminds me of the girl who learned to dance in one year by recording herself every day. Also reminds me of Seth Godin who recommends starting the day by producing rather than consuming and follows the practice by writing a new blog post every day, without fail. Consistency is so hugely important. Quality is born from quantity.

it_learnses 13y ago
"Start the day by producing instead of consuming." Sounds wonderful. I'm going to try and live by that. Thanks for this :)
- mehulkar 13y ago
  Good luck. My longest streak doing this was 6 days I think.
- garybizzle 13y ago
  but i love breakfast.
  - jimhart3000 13y ago
    Then cook it before you eat it.
    - garybizzle 13y ago
      genius
      - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
        But don't "consume" any energy cooking it?
pakitan 13y ago
> Quality is born from quantity Could be. But Seth Godin is hardly the living proof. In fact, I've stopped reading his blog long time ago precisely because of the sheer number of "I need to write about something today" type of posts. I much prefer when people write when they have something really meaningful to say. Which is what Paul Graham usually does, for example. I guess that's a case for "quality breeds quality".

hydralist 13y ago

this is inspiring

calebhc 13y ago

This is so awesome! Thanks for sharing your work. :) I really love the Window Master!

carlosgg 13y ago

Bravo!! I really liked this: "I think the best way to learn is to solve problems that you actually have. This is the primary reason I decided not to follow a course or textbook. By following my own path, I can tackle new concepts and problems in the most logical order possible, which is precisely when I have them. When I have questions, I look them up on Stack Overflow. If I need to make a big jump, like starting a new language or platform, I’ll bootstrap off of a textbook only until I get off the ground."

it_learnses 13y ago
I've started many times to do projects or follow books or lectures, and it's very hard to stay disciplined. However, once you start on your problem, I agree that it's probably a good idea to look at some lectures/books/blogs to take a look at what's available in terms of technologies and practices to save you time and money.

cocoflunchy 13y ago

This one is awesome: http://jenniferdewalt.com/song_machine/page http://jenniferdewalt.com/song_machine/page

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zerr 13y ago
Interesting how that is implemented. Didn't quite get from viewing page source. I mean, where is js?
- ultimatedelman 13y ago
  at some point, she learned about minification and http requests and concatenated all her scripts into one "application" script.
  - gknoy 13y ago
    I can appreciate the reasons for doing so, but as someone interested in reading her code for how she did it, it might be nicer to unbundle and not minify them. Then again, thanks for the point about her Github repo. It's probably clearer to just go read that. :)
  - cgcardona 13y ago
    It looks like the site is built with Ruby on Rails. Rails has a feature called 'The Asset Pipeline'[1] which handles concatenation, minification, and compression [1] http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html
- wcy 13y ago
  Her site is on github. Most of the song machine source appears to be at https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/websites/song_machine_page.js https://github.com/jendewalt/jennifer_dewalt/blob/master/app...
13y ago

franze 13y ago

i like day 114 http://jenniferdewalt.com/image_palette/page http://jenniferdewalt.com/image_palette/page was looking for an online quick to user color picker just yesterday

realrocker 13y ago

Wow. Unimaginable patience.

dantheman 13y ago

Super Impressive, dedicating the time to accomplish this remarkable.

txutxu 13y ago

I take my hat off by personal challenge and the technical side of the project. But I put more kudos on "publishing it". I'm a self-taught which now can say I'm more than a decade in the industry, but I think I could never publish my "learning" projects because maybe I'm ashamed of their quality. I think what you have do is nice, and more important is well presented for others to see. So you maybe encouraging others to do the same. That is the spirit. Great.

mjhea0 13y ago

i'd love to hear more about the resources you are utilizing. plus - how do you find time to work on this for 10 hours/day!?

mjhea0 13y ago
you could really help a lot of people out by writing a basic curriculum!

sonabinu 13y ago

This is inspirational ... find time to dedicate to learning something new

cgcardona 13y ago

Really great idea Jennifer! This is the kind of initiative and creativity that will surely land you multiple job opportunities. It reminds me of the steps which I took to transition into working on software professionally full time. I came to programming relatively late in life when I was 26 and found out that my wife was expecting a baby. The sudden change facing my wife and I made me take a hard look at my skill set to decide how quickly I could provide for us. I decided that my interest in setting up wordpress installs as well as tinkering with Photoshop/Illustrator was the surest, safest, and quickest path to a successful career and decided then and there that within 6 months I would have a job as a junior web developer. To help accelerate this I signed up at my local community college for courses related to getting a web design certificate. Ultimately I took 2 semesters (1 of which was a compressed summer semester) of classes including CS-1, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL. Soon I began to get the feeling that school was moving too slowly. I had joined the W3C HTML5 Working Group and was also participating in the WHATWG and started to realize that I was learning much more by hacking on code in the evenings than I was in class. During this time I started to create a portfolio showcasing new HTML5 APIs as they would become available across different browsers. Mostly I did this out of my own passion for web standards and wanting to understand the most cutting edge APIs as soon as they dropped. However this portfolio soon became incredibly valuable with regards to landing a job. During the second semester I got the chance to interview for a local android dev shop (this is in Santa Cruz, CA). I got the job but didn't find Java to be a good fit for my skills at the time and after a couple of months transitioned to another local dev shop. This company was a rails shop building an app for Walmart's internal network. I got the job based on my HTML5 knowledge and soon found myself learning rails. Around this time I made the decision to quit going to school and to focus full time on my job. I was at this job for about a year until the company unfortunately went out of business. Since I left that job I've spent a year and a half at trulia.com where I was on the mobile team building m.trulia.com, Trulia's native windows 8 app, and the suite of webservices powering Trulia's native iOS/Android/Windows apps. Currently I'm at cardfree.com where I'm working with ruby on rails. The reason I posted this tale is to encourage you to continue what you're doing! When I look back at my short but exciting career I notice that though I feel fortunate to have gotten a couple of semesters of training at a junior college it was mostly always the projects and initiatives which I undertook in my personal and spare time which ended up being the most valuable for me. There is so much opportunity and demand in the consumer web and electronics space right now that showing this initiative and creating such a strong portfolio will surely land you multiple job offers if that's what you are looking for. Either way excellent work and I wish you the best of luck going forward!

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sivers 13y ago

There’s this great story from the book “Art and Fear”, that's very appropriate here: === The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. === Advance congratulations to Jennifer. This is amazing.

it_learnses 13y ago
Wow! that's happened with me so many times. I'll start on a project and I'll always theorize all the best features, and then best technologies to use and I end up switching so many technologies and then going on a tangential curve to learn them, and then I eventually quit the project :(
- 14113 13y ago
  Ditto. A common problem for me is starting a project, then becoming scared that I'll be inadequate, and not complete it properly. This causes me to give up on the project, and I lose out on any experience I might have got. Because I've failed to complete the project, I feel even WORSE going into the next one. It's a vicious cycle.
  - ahmadss 13y ago
    Consider reading a book called "The Now Habit". The author discusses fear of success/failure and the inability to finish projects, and deems that these fears are what cause us to procrastinate. Then he provides a plan/approach/framework to overcome these fears.

zinssmeister 13y ago

This is pretty cool, but I think spending a bit more time with a bigger project instead of doing 180 small ones would be more beneficial. But maybe her goal is to jump into bigger/long term stuff after the 180 days. Either way, congrats for getting out there and building stuff!

freyr 13y ago
Keep in mind, she's starting from scratch, and her goal is to learn fundamentals of programming, not project management. Managing an large, interconnected project is a formidable task in itself. She's made a pretty strong case for starting small, managing scope, and keeping realistic expectations.

exizt88 13y ago

Ah, but note that Mondrian uses stripes of varying width -- it adds a lot to the piece. Consider trying to make the width individual stripes changeable. This might even provide even some insight into Mondrian's art.

DanBC 13y ago

This is amazing. It's inspiring. I like the rules you set for yourself - a blog post to accompany every website, and releasing the code on github. It's important that people know the WWW is not out of their reach, and that they can create stuff. This post, and Neocities, strongly feed that "democratisation" of the Internet. Next it might be a nice idea to do 4 websites, one a month, but polish them so they're standards compliant, as accessible as possible, etc.

chatmasta 13y ago

Wow. Impressive dedication, and even more impressive creativity.

kavithag 13y ago

Very inspiring! Keep up the good work!

lucb1e 13y ago

I thought you said "websites". You mean pages with a single purpose. It's a good idea though and you probably learn a lot from it, but I wouldn't say that I'd made 180 websites after completing this.

dataduck 13y ago

Jennifer, you mentioned you weren't following any kind of course - how did you decide what to build on the next day?

RakshaC 13y ago

Really Wow! Quite inspiring.

thejacenxpress 13y ago

I was leaving the film industry and unemployed for a year. I only did about 4-5 hours a day (had $$ saved) and got far enough to get a great job, but wow. I like that you're not just BS-ing 180 days, but actually challenging yourself.

devgutt 13y ago

I wish I had time to do similar approach solely to learn new things using HN: Hacker News University.

booop 13y ago

In a similar vein, here's a thread of a complete rookie starting from scratch who turned into a fantastic artist by drawing a sketch every day : http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870 http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870 I guess this works for learning programming too.

jianshen 13y ago
I've always loved that thread because there's such a huge history of progress. It'd be interesting to see the OP come back in a year to implement one of these exercises and compare the quality of the code from where she started.

jagan123 13y ago

This is crazy!

ansdkfus13 13y ago

This story indeed is very inspiring. I'm a business major turned front-end designer. I worked as a financial analyst for a semi-conductor company for two years and realized I want a career that fosters my creative side. Working with Excel, though I got very good at it :P, all day long made my day very dull and monotonous. I got my husband to teach me how to code (he's a CS major, working as a product manager for a SF company). Now I am fairly proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS, HTML, and Javascript. Then I made a Python program which analyzes the proper excess inventory to keep for the semiconductor company I worked for, which got me a lot of recognition (the program was prob elementary level and messy but got a credit for being a financial analyst that can code). I quit my day job and I'm working on my startup, for which I'm doing all the front end coding and some of back-end coding as well. Also relocating to SF to pursue this new found passion. I wish the best of luck to Jennifer and other people like her.

karolisd 13y ago

This is inspiring and I'm not sure why. It's not technically impressive, there's far more impressive tutorials and snippets a single Google search away. It's something about the persistence and a desire to learn and improve. It's about the beginner's mind and artistic whimsy. I get to see someone's thought process expressed through a hundred tiny websites.

xmmx 13y ago

I want to learn from your code, but it looks like it's all hidden somewhere?

zwieback 13y ago

Fantastic and I'm also glad to see that most of the comments are positive. I was almost afraid to click on the comments link.

austinrory 13y ago

this is super smart. also, it gives me a good guide for ideas for the sites i want to build as i'm learning to code. THANKS!

jumby 13y ago

Is fizz buzz broken? A random number is nice, but what if not divisible by 3 or 5 - what do I enter? Example: I got 559.

alcuadrado 13y ago

To be honest, as soon as I read the title I thought "but if you force yourself to deliver something new every day you want have enough time to actually learn new stuff in between", and you proved me wrong. Congratulations!

jbp 13y ago

This kind of dedication is inspiring. From http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/51616616313/day-58-explosions http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/51616616313/day-58-explo... : "Tomorrow I head to Pennsylvania to host a bridal shower and bachelorette weekend for my sister. Between the pre-wedding festivities and visiting with family, I’m going to be pretty limited on time for building websites. But, the show must go on and I am excited to see what kind of goodness I can create under pressure." Congratulations Jennifer.

javadi82 13y ago

Thanks so much for posting this. This is the most inspiring "show HN" I've seen here.

wcy 13y ago

My plan is to learn how to code by reading the code for 180 of Jennifer Dewalt's websites in 180 days.

vicks711 13y ago
Not a good plan. If you want to learn how to code by reading code read high quality code on Github.
adrian_pop 13y ago
Not a good plan.

stevewilhelm 13y ago

In the next couple of weeks you might want to look at secure authentication and authorized resource access, scaling, sessions, cross-platform issues, internationalization, adaptive design, etc. Also might want to revisit some of your existing websites to get some exposure to refactoring, bug fixing, prioritizing feature requests, test based development, performance profiling, etc.

espadagroup 13y ago

Finally someone posting a challenge they're undertaking when they have at least accomplished already some of it. I hate seeing people announce that they are about to do something. This is much much better.

freyr 13y ago

So many hurt egos in this thread. If you think what she's done is impossible, have you ever devoted 70/hrs a week to a personal endeavor for 6 straight months? Would you have the willpower and perseverance to stay committed and focused? Also, these are cool sites, infused with a lot of creativity and a refined aesthetic sense, but it's not as if she's claimed to have written an OS or compiler in 115 days. Much of the javascript code is covered extensively in brief online tutorials. Maybe, given 10 hours, you couldn't ingest a tutorial and put your own spin on the concept, but thinking that nobody else could do that is a bit arrogant.

lostlogin 13y ago
The solid-block-of-learning strategy is way less impressive to me than the person who works a 40ish hour a week job then comes home and does many more hours of their own project for moths or years. The want to zone out is strong and after a day of crappy and mind numbing work, beating the laziness is harder I think.
- freyr 13y ago
  > The solid-block-of-learning strategy is way less impressive to me than the person who works a 40ish hour a week job then comes home and does many more hours of their own project for moths or years. You might also say the guy who uses a lawnmower is way less impressive than the guy who cuts his grass with a nail clipper. But I don't want to be the guy with the nail clipper. Believe me, I know the feeling of wanting to zone out after a long day of work, a long commute, etc. I let it sideline my ambition for a decade. She found a way around it. I certainly wouldn't discredit her for that.
  - mindrag 13y ago
    If I could ask, how did you find your own way around that feeling?
    - noAlchemy 13y ago
      I know I'm not the GP, but might be able to be some use here. Context: always wanted to do a maths PhD, but ended up stuck running a small business (50-70 hrs/wk) for a number of years. Managed to keep studying through this and have just landed a PhD. Suggestions: 1. You'll be working while you're tired. So your work won't be as good, you won't make optimal decisions 100% of the time, sometimes you will just underperform relative to you at your best. Accept this - your work is still better than all the work you weren't doing before. Slow progress is always better than no progress. Key here is creating space that's just for work. I have a table which is just for studying, and a logon that's only for studying, which actually really helps. 2. Pick a course of study and stick to it. There's a tradeoff here - for a given area of study, you want to choose the best course for you but don't want to waste time trying several different things (likewise languages, frameworks, etc). Pick 2-3 and whittle down quickly (I choose 2-3 MOOCs or textbooks, then whittle down using the first chapter over a week or two). There may be a slightly better course out there you don't know about, but it really won't make a difference. 3. If your intention is to become a professional, pick a specialisation quickly (even almost randomly if you have to). No-one would give me the time of day when I was just generically interested in 'maths' but as soon as I picked a sub-area and started to learn about it, people took me seriously. (Obvious caveats apply about over-specialisation) 4. Start talking to other people. You really need to have done 2 & 3, otherwise you won't have any progress to show, and nothing to talk about, but once you've done enough to talk sensibly to others (which might be less than you think) then you'll be more engaged and less likely to drop out/quit. 5. Accept your limitations. Sometimes work/life will take over - sometimes you can make sacrifices and continue to get work done, sometimes doing this would be too painful and you'll need to take a break to get things in order. The thing here is just to show up. If I had to choose one sentence from all of this to give as advice, it'd be the last one. Just show up.

akivabamberger 13y ago

Great idea. Way to go, Jennifer.

maxmem 13y ago

Who has the time or money to teach yourself to code in 180 days?

sanjkris 13y ago

Just made my middle-school kids' summer break more interesting. If you take all this js knowledge and add android/ios skills, you can increase your hourly fees by 10X. I myself would hire you for my mobile suite of apps.

eat 13y ago

These comments are infuriating, but not unexpected. So many people who have likely wasted their last 115 days attempting to find every fault with someone who clearly hasn't. OP: Excellent work, and keep it up. I hope you take the criticisms and disbelief for what they truly are: incontrovertible evidence that you're doing something very right.

bsklaroff 13y ago
If I were Jennifer I'd be flattered by the comments. It must feel great to have produced so much quality work that HN naysayers tell you what you did is impossible after you've already done it.
- unimpressive 13y ago
  This, when I used to make Halo maps I would often be accused of modding the game to make them. I always took this as a compliment.

jqueryin 13y ago

This is great and all, but I do have to call BS on no previous coding experience. Perhaps she had plenty of HTML experience and wouldn't regard that as coding experience. If you look at her early examples, even on something like day 3, you find the following in the source: * Inclusion of a CSS reset stylesheet * Inclusion of jQuery 1.9.1 * Usage of HTML5 footer tag * Inclusion of the HTML5 shiv JS If this wasn't boilerplate HTML being used, I have no idea where a beginner would know these three things on day 3. Perhaps just stumbling upon the right project? Also noteworthy is the inclusion of an external JS file for loading Google Analytics. Most people have no idea what this is or how to set it up

ValG 13y ago

An additional anecdote comes from Jerry Seinfeld, (comedian). He says that his goal when he got into comedy (and still to this day) is to write jokes every day. Create a chain of joke writing and keep track of it in a physical way (in his example, a calendar that he marks off with an X every time he sits down to write). You create momentum that you don't want to break, and even though you might not be writing good jokes (good code, etc...) every day, there is still improvement going on. [1] All anecdote, but it seems to point to the fact that the value of iteration on DOING is more valuable than iteration on PLANNING. (i.e. plan a little bit, and do a lot). [1] http://www.writersstore.com/dont-break-the-chain-jerry-seinfeld/ http://www.writersstore.com/dont-break-the-chain-jerry-seinf...

rubyclown 13y ago

It's 180 HTML & Javascript PAGES, not 180 WEBSITES! Big Difference. Nevertheless, congratulations on your dedication.

dimadima 13y ago

I'd love to know how you beasted Git and deployment sufficiently and did your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... 16th project every day, deploying from day 1. How did you go from having zero Git knowledge to deploying to a web server 10 hours later?

tourbillonfunk 13y ago

Wow, a huge congratulations to you! I'm just starting my journey to become a programmer and am dedicating the same amount of time. You're dedication, patience and work ethic really inspire me! Awesome job on all of your projects.

progx 13y ago

Cant wait until Number 180 when you build a complete Web Framework ;-)

bobwaycott 13y ago

This is awesome, Jennifer. Keep up the good work!

Abundnce10 13y ago

It looks like the majority of her Github commits are happening during 6pm-12am http://imagebin.org/265513 http://imagebin.org/265513

ron1986 13y ago

Great Work! Keep Going !!

eagler 13y ago

Congratulations! I'm impressed how you just got started rather than waiting for "the perfect moment." Your persistence and progress are inspiring. Also, your work doubles as a collection of engaging content ideas for teaching beginning programming :) Thank you!

maxisnow 13y ago

How cool! Keep it up!

ekr 13y ago

I'm going to ignore all the malicious comments about how fraudulent this is. This is an amazing achievement, and it reminds me of a much better way of improving your skills. Last time I wanted to build a ray-tracer, I starting using the PBR book, and then started learning about Fourier series and transforms, about signals etc. This of depth-first aquisition of knowledge is not very adequate for the average human mind, whose curiosity and motivation are much better served by achieving many short and tangible results, a so-called feedback loop. Seeing Jennifer and her progress, I'm determined to start a similar project: 1 demo (not necessarily 4k/64k) coded in asm/GLSL per week. That's after I actually finish writing my hobby OS, which is being done in the same DFS fashion (started reading Tanenbaum's book on Minix, it has plenty of references).

iguana 13y ago

This is awesome, humbling, and inspiring at the same time. (There were 180 comments on this story, now there are 181)

fnbaptiste 13y ago

This is awesome. When I read the title I was expecting a bunch of exercises in layout with different slick UIs and such. I was very surprised by how creative each of these were. They're very fun to go through. And in the end, when it comes to getting a job, this kind of stuff looks way better than "went to school, got this degree".

jorgecastillo 13y ago

I am really impressed this gal sure has a promising future as a software developer. I must also say this made me a little sad, she has done in days what I haven't been able to do in years.

DarrenMills 13y ago

It's a great way that learning to code can produce a ton of content and experimental innovation. Code Academy (and others) listen up: What if everyone produced content while learning to code?

miguelindurain 13y ago
that's a great idea! It's actually similar to the idea behind duolingo.com People produce translations while learning a language

shire 13y ago

Wow this must really time consuming. Really great work. Inspirational

akurilin 13y ago

Basically, work a lot. Make sure there's always a chunk of work that's new and challenging, a form of deliberate practice. Also make sure there's a chunk of work that's reinforcing what you already know until it becomes second nature. Rinse and repeat. Kaizen.

mrcactu5 13y ago

execution

auggierose 13y ago

So many envious comments here, ridiculous. Jennifer, this is really inspiring stuff!

amerika_blog 13y ago

I wouldn't launch this kind of project without some kind of ace up my sleeve. I'd either prepare it in advance, vamp it all from the "tutorials," or have some backup code somewhere. That would be necessary to avoid having a mundane interruption cause the project to fail.

jbranchaud 13y ago

Jennifer, I've skimmed through a handful of your projects and they are all very creative, fun and thoughtful. I'd be excited to see what you could do with d3.js (http://d3js.org/ http://d3js.org/). Check it out if you haven't already!

keefe 13y ago

180 iterations of the same website in 180 days and you have a company :]

kwal0203 13y ago

Thanks

donaq 13y ago

You are super awesome. I have been programming for years and I still don't know how to do some of the stuff you've done for your websites. I'm sure I could easily learn how to, but then it's easy for me because I have the advantage of years of experience. To be able to get to where you are within 3 months is astounding to me and that tells me something about the validity of your approach, so I'm gonna shamelessly rip you off the next time I need to learn a new skill. Somebody hire this person!

kenster07 13y ago

I have mixed emotions, not about the author, but the implications of this thread. It is great that she shows such dedication to the craft. But has dedication to a craft really become so rare that it is worthy of 900 plus points on hacker news? I know countless software engineers who work their tails off every waking hour, myself included. Do we all deserve hacker news posts? Or should we elevate our expectations?

nrivadeneira 13y ago
I don't think there's any real value in HN points, so you're basically asking if it's worthy of something worthless. It's just an indicator of interest by the HN community, not a gift of any worth. That being said, I'm sure a decent chunk of the 900 votes were from software devs, many of whom are probably ones that work their tails off. It's possible there is something more intriguing than the dedication alone. One thing I find interesting is the head-first/all-in nature of the project.

jmtame 13y ago

I looked through your comment history to see if you already answered and couldn't find it. What happened when you got stuck? I'd suspect there were points where you couldn't figure something out; it tends to happen when you become frustrated and you have to take a break. You mentioned that you had no previous programming experience. How much time did you spend learning before you created the first app on day 1? I ask because this goes against the pattern I've observed in most students. I was involved in starting Bloc, which is an online programming bootcamp. I think the #1 value proposition is having a person there to help when you get unstuck. It's fascinating to see you overcome the learning curve on your own which affects most people trying to learn. Just so I can fully understand: did you have any human interaction or assistance during this entire time? That to me is the most impressive part of this. A lot of us had TAs, professors, group projects where we worked closely with others. I don't know a single person in my own network who has learned to program on their own without any human help. Hope it doesn't come across as if I'm belittling what you've done or seem skeptical, this is really impressive!

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gnus 13y ago

Jennifer, you are just plain amazing. You are my inspiration.

j45 13y ago

How admirable, good for you. I don't have anything more to add than my sincere appreciation for seeing what you're doing, it's a fantastic example.

atmosx 13y ago

Congrats, it's amazing what you have achieved.

t0dd 13y ago

Very impressive. It reminds one that complaining about "too much work" is often just a poor excuse for petrifying in a niche of self-satisfaction and comfort. I can't read all of this, browse what you've accomplished in so little time, and doubt the feeling great things are destined for you. Congrats!

throwaway3030 13y ago

I'm a software engineer. I love this style of learning. However, if the idea of building 180 different websites in 180 days sounds so unappealing to me I actually winced when I read the title, should I find another career? (real question) I'd rather do the opposite thing, sell my laptop and do 180 drawings or sculptures in 180 days.

alexdowad 13y ago

Awesome stuff, Jennifer! Congratulations!

whbk 13y ago

From her Facebook, September 2009: "If you don't know already, I've created an iPhone app! I've been working really hard on this and have had lots of fun taking pictures of myself and my friends. Oh, what it does is gives everyone in the picture a HOT or COLD rating. The app is called ruHOT and is available for download for the iPhone and Android phones. Check it out!" So yeah, highly doubt this is truly her first rodeo. Cool project(s) nonetheless and impressive dedication.

ryan-allen 13y ago
Interesting sleuthing. Maybe it's just exceptionally well targeted self-advertising. I know I'll get creamed by playing the gender card, but if this were a guy, would we be so coy to call them out on the fact that 'this ain't your first time'. I think if anything this kind of misinformation regarding 'the possible output for a beginner' is actually discouraging to beginning developers. I do think this experiment it self-serving. I have been doing web for around 10 years and it would be no cakewalk (albeit not impossible, if I had the time) to come up with a new novel idea every day for 180 days, and certainly as a beginner this kind of output is the most improbable thing I have ever seen (I have taught a few smart people how to get started and it takes a long time). So, do we play along and misinform all the other true beginners or do we call out this Red Herring? If we want more women to be welcome in tech they have to be held to the same kind of standards (honesty and ability). We can't let one individual get away with this kind of dishonesty because of gender. And if you don't think this kind of manipulation exists, you should go read Reddit sometime (it's full of stuff like this, you can turn a picture of a random puppy into massive attention by saying 'look at who I adopted from an abusive home! I will love him for ever!'). Think about it people! EDIT: The projects Jen has done are cool and interesting, no doubt. And the 'just f'ing do it' idea is even better. But can't possibly be programming beginner. EDIT 2: I probably shouldn't be such a bastard, but anyway. Good job. Just be honest where you are coming from and you'll get deeper respect, I think is my point.
- James_Duval 13y ago
  I created a game in Actionscript 2.0 back in 2009. I started to program in around November of 2011. Being able to cobble together an app or what-have-you is very different from programming, I think. I would not call what I did back then programming. I even wrote a couple of follow-up games which used a tile-based map system and pathfinding but didn't store nodes on the map as variables - the game calculated the location of the nodes each time they were to be used. That's hideous. I'd also point out that the vastness of the internet's resources should not be underestimated. I could create something awesome in 10 hours using Codecademy as a reference and generic tutorials I found using Google. The problem for me would be finding 10 hours to do this in. I do not think that this is a deliberate attempt to deceive as much as it is a sense the person feels that the person is 'not a proper programmer'. Hell, if I created a similar project now, after completing coursera/proglang and coursera/algorithm-design-and-analysis and working with web design for about a year and a half, I would still call it "teaching myself to code", because there is so much to learn I'm barely dipping my toe in the water.

jaekwon 13y ago

I tried to splode a bacon bit, but it would not splode. Very disappointed. But love the execution. Good job and keep going!

marincounty 13y ago

Steven King vs. Vladimar Nabrakov

Nodex 13y ago

You're trying to tell us that you've learned from scratch having never written code before in your life? And in 180 days using tricks like minifying/concatting all assets in your js, adding csrf tokens and many other tricks that a lot of very seasoned web developers don't often use? Pull the other one.... Nice way to get on HN and to the top though - I take my hat off to you. Also. 180 single pages is not 180 websites

bencollier49 13y ago

Incidentally, does that remind anyone of the "Cascade Cassette 50"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_50 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_50 The work is of profoundly higher quality, though, I just mean in terms of volume!

styrmis 13y ago

This is really great! There are quite possibly many better ways to spend 180 days if you wanted to make money (#1 would probably be completing every Rails tutorial available) but I don't think that is important here. Rather, I find her approach inspiring and it's something that can be applied to any endeavour. One nice thing that she will have, even if she doesn't make it through the full 180 is a record of her earliest creations through to her latest. Like when keeping a journal she'll be able to refer to it when she's feeling low and see the progress she's made, and she'll have a record of what she's done that transcends her memory. At my first job I was lucky enough to report directly to the Technical Director of the company who took the time to mentor me on what it means to be a good software engineer. The first thing he had me do is to keep an engineer's journal. The benefits of this would only become clear a few weeks down the line but clear it was: I would encounter a problem I knew I had solved before but couldn't quite recall the solution to; I would flip back to find my notes and there it would be. Fast forward a few months, then a year and the value received from this simple act of keeping an organised journal far exceeded my expectations. I have since kept the habit going but I feel that more can be done here. On one level you can keep notes for yourself and improve your own productivity. A level up would be to write those notes up on an internal wiki. One level up further and you've polished them into material you can publish to a wider community. One level up again you can inspire others to do the same through your efforts. One such effort that I have seen (outside of Jennifer's) that I think is completely worth anyone's time to explore is Journey of an Absolute Rookie: Paintings and Sketches (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870 http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870), 10 full years of recorded progress of a beginning artist that blew my mind. Warning: you may lose a lot of time to that forum thread! There is something beautiful and powerful in things that have been worked on and tended to for years, things that cannot be rushed no matter what: the only way to have 10 years of recorded progress today is to have started 10 years ago and to have kept it up for the duration. What a present to give to yourself!

abinop 13y ago

Dear Jennifer, something tells me this will be the most difficult of the 180 days. If all this buzz does not distruct you, nothing will.

ab21 13y ago

Reminds me of http://danceinayear.com http://danceinayear.com

gabeguz 13y ago

Wow. This is inspiring. I've been programming for years, and don't think I'd be able to create something new every day for 180 days. Major props.

happypeter 13y ago

Amazing story, love it. Yes it's all about building wonderful things. I've been doing one screencast per week since 2011, I have to say it's really really lots of fun.

ngoel36 13y ago
happypeter: Would love to hear about what type of screencasts you're building, my company (https://www.bitcast.io https://www.bitcast.io) is looking for the best screencasters we can find. Feel free to reach out at nikhil at bitcast.io.

rXoX 13y ago

This is all great and stuff, but how does this person keep a roof over her head while she does this little thing that's so cute and inspirational? How are the bills getting paid?

barlet 13y ago

This is great. - she is learning to code - she works hard - she is creative with her ideas - everyday - and she is communicating very well - and getting better at it.

rdouble 13y ago

Did you pre-plan the ideas for the websites? When doing art, I used to set goals like "do 30 drawings in a month." However, I've found that I just draw the same stuff over and over again if I leave it at that. I have to actually make a theme (draw 30 plants) and even get a detailed list (draw a jade plant, a hydrangea, etc) in order to actually make any progress. I am curious if you did any planning like this regarding the choice of sites you made?

Tycho 13y ago

I've thought of doing this before. Make one attempt every day, and see it through. Not just for websites but for other skills like songwriting, drawing, short-story writing, and also other types of programming. Needless to say I never went through with it, but it's good to see someone who has. Taking songwriting as an example, what's interesting to me is that basically anyone can try it. Sit down with a note pad, think of a tune, and make a verse-chorus-verse-chorus song (chords and riffs are optional extras). No doubt people like Paul McCartney do try this every day, but then there's the vast majority of people who never make the attempt once in their life, despite their being no real barriers.

dwdwzzz 13y ago

i'm curious what kind tools are you using.

smooradian 13y ago

I have a new hero.

vinhnx 13y ago

Way to go, Jennifer. Best wishes for you!

apathetic 13y ago

Hi, what day-to-day tools did you uses to create these? I wish I did something like this too instead of just playing all day :(

vickytnz 13y ago

Great idea. One minor quibble though: it's 180 webpages or webapps for me at least. I'd say that websites require full infrastructure etc.