Sunday, March 1, 2009

My Chain

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I finally decided what my chain should be.

"Don't break the chain", in case you are not already aware, is a motivational tool attributed to Jerry Seinfeld. The concept is that every day you produce something related to your craft. Each day you do this, you put an "X" through the day. After a little while, you have a chain of X's and you begin to be offended at the idea of breaking the chain.

The end result is not the chain. Rather it is the skills acquired and honed by building up that chain.

Jerry's craft is comedy. Mine is software development.

I have decided that my chain is going to be converting my personal site (EEE Cooks) from Rails 2.0 to something running on CouchDB.

Moreover the X's are not going to be on a calendar that only I can see, but they will be on this blog. Every day until I have EEE Cooks running on CouchDB in production, I will blog about my latest experience in the effort.

The point is not to make EEE Cooks better than it already is. The point is an excuse to practice my craft. And to become a better blogger while I'm at it.

8 comments:

  1. We are watching. Do not disappoint. :)

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  2. Sounds cool. What do you mean by "something"?

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  3. Jeff, thanks. Nothing like making a big, bold proclamation in a public place to give you motivation. If you ever think of doing something like this, late at night, right before you go to bed is great. Don't save as draft otherwise you'll likely never follow through :)

    pjb3, "produce something" means to document a step that I have taken that day to move toward my goal: could be as big as deployed beta code, could be as little as wrote a spec. "something running on CouchDB" means that I am not making a decision on the framework yet (though it'll be a ruby framework).

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  4. Finally came up with a chain of my own (since I see you've been doing very well with yours): http://forthright.plainlystated.com/2009/05/blog-post.html

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  5. Would a visual of the chain, just X's and spaces, perhaps at your blog's top right, be a cool idea? A small Gadget, good for visually inclined readers, might be easy to update. Blogspot's 'Add a Gadget-Add your own' takes any URL ... or not.

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  6. The http://calendaraboutnothing.com/ has something along those lines. I always meant to go back and add that for my own chains, but was too busy with the chains themselves. Maybe someday I'll hijack my chain to work on such widget. That may be too meta though :)

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  7. I love the idea of the chain. I will follow this. Thanks that you've put this in words. Greetings from Germany. Benny

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  8. great to see you had an awesome 366 days bro, I am going to try and do this chain thing aswell but I still gotta figure out how to link my chains, because I would not be able to post everyday.

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