NaNoWriMo? How About NaCoWriMo?

November, if you’re an internet savvy fiction writer, is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. As a writer in my previous life, I participated in NaNoWriMo several times. The objective is to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. It’s insanity personified. I spent countless nights awake writing to get to 50,000 words and only ever “won” once. You win a certificate and some nice discounts from writing software people. The community is great as well.

Well, I want to propose a NaCoWriMo, National Code Writing Month, where new devs especially, write as much new code, or contribute to a few new open source projects, or work on their own projects, everyday, for the month of November. You could also do a tutorial everyday, like Treehouse or Free Code Camp. Should you have a finished project? Nah. Coding is harder than writing is, despite what writers say, and so you should have something if you are working on a new project. If you’re contributing to an open source project, contribute to at least two or three.

So how do I measure winning? In NaNoWriMo you won when you got to 50,000 words on December 1st at midnight. How I measure it will be if you have a working framework of a project, have your green commit blocks filled, have your Free Code Camp logs filled green, everyday for a month. What do you win? The satisfaction of knowing you accomplished something, small or large, contributed to something large or small, that pushed you further towards your goal of becoming a competent developer.

Maybe I’ll thow in something good to the first person to complete NaCoWriMo, like a book or Amazon Gift card (I don’t have a lot of money so you’re looking at $25 max) or an iTunes Gift Card for that dev app you were eyeing.

November, if you’re an internet savvy fiction writer, is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. As a writer in my previous life, I participated in NaNoWriMo several times. The objective is to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. It’s insanity personified. I spent countless nights awake writing to get to 50,000 words and only ever “won” once. You win a certificate and some nice discounts from writing software people. The community is great as well.

Well, I want to propose a NaCoWriMo, National Code Writing Month, where new devs especially, write as much new code, or contribute to a few new open source projects, or work on their own projects, everyday, for the month of November. You could also do a tutorial everyday, like Treehouse or Free Code Camp. Should you have a finished project? Nah. Coding is harder than writing is, despite what writers say, and so you should have something if you are working on a new project. If you’re contributing to an open source project, contribute to at least two or three.

So how do I measure winning? In NaNoWriMo you won when you got to 50,000 words on December 1st at midnight. How I measure it will be if you have a working framework of a project, have your green commit blocks filled, have your Free Code Camp logs filled green, everyday for a month. What do you win? The satisfaction of knowing you accomplished something, small or large, contributed to something large or small, that pushed you further towards your goal of becoming a competent developer.

Maybe I’ll thow in something good to the first person to complete NaCoWriMo, like a book or Amazon Gift card (I don’t have a lot of money so you’re looking at $25 max) or an iTunes Gift Card for that dev app you were eyeing.

Good idea? Let me know in the comments.