Habits

A couple of days ago, I listened to a great podcast episode from Giant Robots and on it they talked about the habit of writing 1,000 words every day and how much you can accomplish over time by simply being consistent.

I’m not really sure how to go about this yet, but I want to get in the habit of deliberate practice every single day. You can measure your output as a programmer by the number of lines that you write, but I don’t feel like counting lines of code is really a good indicator of output. Just the other day I spent hours learning about regular expressions and all I did was write one line of code. So, probably the best indicator to track is time.

My goal with getting into the habit of daily deliberate practice is not to just write code that I’m familiar with writing, but to learn new programming techniques that stretch my mind and might be very difficult for me at the moment.

For example, writing a new web application in Sinatra would be very easy for me to do, but creating a web application using a web framework like Rails would be quite difficult at the moment. However, I’m sure that if I were to work on Rails programming for ‘x’ number of minutes every single day after just a few weeks I’d be very comfortable in my abilities.