Free Coding Caused an Avalanche

It’s about a month since I started doing some free coding everyday as part of an evening ritual. The idea was to spend a minimum of 10 minutes writing any bit of silly code I could think of. It could be completely meaningless random bits of syntax or it could be a useful script. And after it was done I’d commit the file up to github. I even had a little script that would check github every hour after 6pm and nag me if I hadn’t committed any code yet for the day.

Free coding started out as a bit of a struggle. Trying to think of something to code everyday can be difficult but eventually I started on some multi-day ideas. I wrote a piece of code to pull down daily stock prices for 3000 stocks in the NASDAQ one night and the next night I computed which stocks had the best one week returns for each week of 2011. (FYI: if you had bought on monday, sold on fridays and held the top 3 performing stocks each week in 2011 you would end the year with a return of 1100%)

It got me thinking about a bigger project idea for a stock market analysis algorithm. So I wrote down some notes about it.

Then I free-coded a couple of nights on a project template engine where you can have a template in github in which files can be written with moustache templates and the script will download it, ask you a bunch of questions required by the templates then render out the full directory structure given your answers. I spent a couple hours contributing back to an open source project as part of this effort.

After that I got inspired by something at work where we wanted to answer a question like “which projects do we have that use service X?” So I wrote and open-sourced a library that can parse Ruby Gemfiles. It’s published on PyPI – first python package I’ve put up there.

For the past week I have started to work on a project estimation web app. It’s still very rudimentary but when it’s finished I think it’ll be genuinely ground breaking.

Over the course of one month I have gone from having trouble thinking of things to code, to having an abundance of great ideas I’m excited about working on.