Image: Mike Wilson

A cool advantage of being in the habit of writing everyday is that you will become inclined to ask, every single day, “What did I learn today?”

Having written every day for almost one and a half months now, I never accept “nothing” as an answer anymore. It’s just impossible to not learn something new in a 24-hour day - even noticing that the colour of the paint on the door you always walk through is something new and interesting.

This habit has also made me more inquisitive. Now I find myself walking around with my eyes wide open, observing what’s going on around me, near and far, with the intent of discovering something else that is interesting that I might write about. Every night when I write, I am wrung like a sponge, and my thoughts drip onto the page.

The result is a wonderful freshness the next day, where my mind is light and I’m able to make new observations with confidence, knowing that yesterday’s thoughts have dried up on a page and logged here, for eternity. (Or until my webserver crashes or a widespread internet virus wipes out my data.)

Momentum of coding

When a programmer writes code it usually starts out slow (especially when the programmer in question is new to being one), but like in the physical realm, once she overcomes the inertia of writing the first few HTML ‘div’s and JavaScript functions, momentum builds.

If the first function that does something a particular way works, and we need a second function that does something similar, it becomes a light matter of copying and pasting and a few minor tweaks.

Over time, we learn to recognise patterns, and that accelerates our problem-solving even further.

The start is always the toughest. Get over the molehill and the mountain behind becomes your playground.