Would you spend 100+ hours to make your dream come true?

I bet you would. But even when you fight for your dreams, it is hard to make the first step in long run. Because at the beginning you are never guaranteed you achieve your goal with putting specified amount of effort. You’ll know the numbers only when you actually accomplish that.

Today marks 3 (THREE!) months since I started to blog. And I’m really happy for it. For both: that I started with such activity back then in the beginning of March and that I managed the challenge of blogging 2 times a week for 3 months. That’s big thing for me, and I must honestly admit I’m proud of myself 🙂

Doubts…

As you may guess, before I launched it I was really afraid of participating in that contest. Of running the blog. What will happen if I won’t manage? What my family/friends would say about prospective withdrawal? But then I remembered one of the most inspirational Micheal Jordan’s quote I heard a few months ago, which I luckily run by recently, which is:

I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.

So I thought: yes, I can fail, I even probably will fail. But! I will never forgive myself if I won’t try.

And I gave it a try. And I didn’t fail 🙂

Thanks to that courage, the courage to dream, the courage to at least try, I can tell you today with great satisfaction:

We did it!

There surely wasn’t only myself on the other side of the monitor – I’ve got my wife who I’m more than grateful for what she did to support me during this contest. I have my relatives and friends who have cheered for me to pass the challenge and also those who have even helped me technically when I was stuck at some IT-related stuff. Many, many thanks!

The success is ours, I’d never done this without YOU!

Statistics

You may wonder – how much does it take to create such blog for a beginner like me? Well… it takes some time, but as I proved, it is not impossible to achieve 🙂

Thanks to RescueTime and WakaTime I can give you an approximate amount of time I spent on driving these things.

1. Developing CodeMate – WakaTime in Visual Studio recorded about 20 hours of developing CodeMate + related projects (FullCalendar examples). However it doesn’t take things I’ve been searching for in the Internet/StackOverflow, articles I’ve been reading to learn how to do some things in ASP MVC, so I think it won’t be bad to multiply this by 2. Which gives us 40 hours.
2. Writing posts + configuring the blog website. This is recorded by Rescue time. In March it was 21 hours, 14 hours in April, and 13 in May. Adds up to 48 hours spent in the codinghappiness domain.
3. Searching for suitable words in dictionaries, thesaurus or context bases (I’m writing in the foreign language and it hurts sometimes 🙂 ).  5+ hours in total for this point.
4. Some time was spent on my Facebook marketing, Twitter account, managing domain and hosting which surely will add up to at least 10 hours (it’s hard to distinguish how much of my Facebook’s time report was business and how much was private 🙂 )

All above makes 100+ hours spent on this blog during last 3 months. It was probably even more, however, these are the numbers I have documented.

Did I win?

Yes! Definitely. However, we’re before the voting yet 🙂 How could I won then?

I won my blog, my dedicated space in the internet.

I won the belief that my knowledge, experience or even shared issue can give value to someone else. That’s a magical feeling when somebody tells you: thanks for your article. Thanks for your blog.

It’s just invaluable.

I won the proof, that I can spare the time to do great things. Maybe it is a big word but… when I realize that I develop my skills, creativity and passion instead of watching TV or so… that’s great actually.

At this moment it doesn’t matter how good or bad the concept of CodeMate is, doesn’t matter how good or bad its realization is… What matters most here is that I actively develop that. Outside working hours. That I’m capable of waking up earlier in the morning than before to do some blogging/coding before my daily job. That I’m disciplined enough to resist the temptation of doing something else.

That’s the biggest prize.

Further plans

I liked my concept of the popularization of pair programming and I still believe in its sense. I liked the blogging and I surely will be doing that after the contest finish. In June, however, I’ll be notably less active than during last quarter, because I need to rest a bit and gather strengths for further work.

Furthermore, I plan to publish only one post per week in the future – two posts are too much for me at this point. I hope it will let myself be more regular (for example – new post published each Monday morning).

Nonetheless: Thank you very much for your presence, thanks for any act of supporting myself on that journey. Today I am proud of myself, but you can also be proud that your input made myself a blogger.

Blogger. I desired to call myself ‘blogger’ one day. Today I think I’m finally eligible of doing so. I AM A BLOGGER! 😎

Thanks!