Challenge finished — reflections

Daniel Rendox - Oct 2 '23 - - Dev Community

My 2 months of learning and building in public challenge is over! Time to summarize the results!

So I set two goals for myself:

  1. Learn all I need to build a scalable Android app.
  2. Create an MVP of my app.

And now I don’t really know whether I completed the challenge or not because, on the one hand, I fully achieved the first goal, on the other hand, my app is still far from an MVP.

However, these 2 months were really fun and productive because I

  • found my blogging path;
  • established the best way of learning that works for me;
  • kept myself exposed to the world;
  • had an ending point in learning and made it before the deadline;
  • entered university, had my daily routine changed, and met new people.

I have seen that all the benefits of learning and building in public I wrote about indeed apply. By summarizing my progress I organize myself, keep being motivated, and keep my goals clear.

Although I’m kind of a productivity beast, I struggle to keep up with habits, especially those that provide long-term and not short-term benefits. I found a cool solution: share progress with others to stay accountable.

Now I’m going to heavily focus on building my app, and I’ll keep sharing my progress. I’ll make it an article only when this is a really worth-sharing achievement, though. That’s because writing such articles is like a burden for me now, I perceive them as something serious, not as short reflections in a couple of sentences. As a result, I don’t have time to write other articles that I’d like to write more. I think I’ll be good with comments on threads like “What was your win this week?” This will actually keep me more accountable.

I think the decision to take this challenge was worth it. However, everyone follows their own path and I learned there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It’s important to just do what you like and follow your passion.

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