Two Skills a Month Challenge 4 Report - Developing open source contribution habit and learning the basics of NodeJS

Written by Arindam Dawn

Oct 31, 2019

Takes about 4 minutes to read ⏱

“the key to victory was creating the right routines.” ― Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business

Staying motivated and determined each and every day is not easy. Our mind is surprisingly innovative when it comes to discovering new distractions. It hates breaking changes in routine and taking challenges. I realized myself getting out of track with my challenge exercises several times during the month. While my mind was always ready with different excuses for not having done tasks which I was supposed to do, I always wanted to find out ways to bring myself back in track.

TL;DR : - I have successfully completed the Hacktober fest 2019 by doing 4 open source contributions while I was not able to do any practical project using nodeJs - the language I was aiming to get hold of this month.

Contributing to Open Source projects

Prior to this month, I never contributed to any open source project so I thought to try my chances this time during the hacktober fest. I read some articles on the steps to contribute and complete hacktober fest and found numerous helpful resources. As a beginner towards open source contribution, I selected some very basic challenges (projects) to which I could contribute without much hassle. After few hiccups, I was able to submit 4 successful contribution (the minimum criteria to complete Hacktober fest) and became eligible to receive the much awaited Hacktober fest special edition t-shirt 😀.

My hacktober fest profile

I hope to get my t-shirt soon 😄. This was indeed a fun way to enter into the world of open source contribution and I would explore more and do better contributions in future.

Learning NodeJS

This is where things went slightly out of track. Initially I started practicing the tutorials from NodeSchool which were quite good. However, I became stuck with some advanced level challenges and stopped attempting them later. This eventually led to boredom and made me switch to other video based lessons. Though I was of the impression that I was able to understand everything, when I tried creating practical projects, I was not able to connect the dots. I will be aiming to go though the basics again during my idle time the upcoming month and try creating a practical project as well.

It seemed like a very ordinary month to me in terms of acquiring new skills until I happened to read a phenomenal book - The spirit of Kaizen - Robert Maurer. The word Kaizen is a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc.

The author shows with great examples how people and companies have achieved great things not by setting up huge targets and goals but by taking one small step at a time. It has given me a new perspective towards setting goals and targets. I try to break my daily tasks into very small chunks and try to accomplish them instead of thinking of completing the entire task as a whole. For example, on days when I feel lethargic to hit the gym, I just aim to wear my gym clothes and soon after I find myself in the gym like magic.

To make my challenges more focussed and productive, I have decided to take up only one specific challenge a month instead of two to avoid juggling between tasks and staying more focussed on a specific goal. If things go well, I plan to make videos about things that interests me in the upcoming months so that I am able to share and communicate in a better way with you.

Books that I read this month

Will be soon sharing my new interesting challenge!

Have a great one!