Code Quality Challenge #0 - Getting Started

I recently did the 30 Day Code Quality Challenge and enjoyed it greatly. As such, now that it's over I'm trying to think of ways to keep the momentum built from doing 20 minute "little wins" every day for a month.

On the last day on the forums Ben (the organizer) solicited feedback on the event. I found myself thinking of some new activities for challenges that could be used and suggested them.

And then I thought: why not just organize them myself? So that's what this post is about. This one is a meta post describing my plan, but after this, I'm going to periodically (definitely not daily, maybe weekly?) post a blog post describing a code quality challenge much like what happened in the event. I'll describe the challenge and why it's worthwhile, do it, and then describe what I did and how it went.

Sometimes they'll be things like "hey try out this cool refactoring idea". Sometimes "hey go read this stuff to learn something cool". And everything in between. The key part is not the output, but rather the building and maintaining of the habit of dedicating 20 minutes, just 20 minutes, to making whatever it is you're working on better (be that your codebase, yourself, your career, etc).

Sounds like a plan, now to write up day 1....