I have been watching some of the buzz online about Steve Hopkins 30 day March blog posting challenge. While I haven’t really committed to it anywhere and have missed a few days at the start of it it has got me thinking more about the kind of topics that I want to write about, things where I feel I either have something to add or something interesting to share. I don’t think I will be able to keep up to a post a day but want to try more own version for it.

Steve has talked a fair bit of late about creating a habit calendar and keeping up your chosen habit every day in order too see how long a chain of days you can create and cement the chosen pursuit as a permanent habit. In Steve’s case and for the purposes of the March challenge, one of the main habits being formed is that of blogging. In my case last month I made 2 blog posts, one here and one on the AffClicks Blog. This month, while not aiming to post every day I am aiming to post a lot more. Basically any time I have something that I think I can order my thoughts well around a blog post and also to get through a few more of the Affiliate Marketing topics I want to cover on the AffClicks blog.

So what I want to find out is not wether I can post every day, which I feel with startup demands in might be hard, but whether I can make slower but sustained improvements to my blogging habit.

Also I will be following along and referencing in posts what others are posting for the challenge. I was tossing up the idea of trying to make a small web app to track peoples progress before it got underway but didn’t have the time to get stuck into doing it.

(As an aside, the wordpress gods weren’t on my side tonight, spent way longer making things work than writing this post)

While I have been programming for a long time I’m not afraid to admit that some of my software engineering practices around my programming haven’t been the best. When I first took up PHP in the early 2000′s as a 14 year old writing unmaintainable, security hole ridden spagetti code that you would ftp to an apache mod_php shared host wasn’t all that unusual. It’s what most people, the communities that I was a part of more interested in the end goal than the programming behind it anyway, were doing.

Over time and through my degree I have progressively got better at the software engineering side: structuring and commenting maintainable code, thinking about a class/ db hierarchy, sever setups, source control, issue/ bug tracking, testing and deployment. Since starting work on my startup over a year ago now I have been largely coding alone, which makes it doubly hard to follow good standards and not slack off. I know that any time saved by cutting corners now will come back to bite me once I expand my team. Even programming away by myself though AffClicks is now sizeable enough that that lack of proper tests is coming back to bite me with some refactoring I have had to do recently. This is also a good thing though, a reality check, that I can’t just code away without building proper structure around that code. It’s alo slowly showing me the value of unit tests, I have read plenty on the subject over a period of time but have never really embraced them.

Appart from AffClicks I still have projects I have been working on or a long time or contracting for where much of the development involves simply FTP’ing files to the live server which is something I want to look to eliminate.

So my goal for the new year is to get a lot more rigorous with my practices, write better more maintainable code that isn’t impossible to decipher once other people come onto the team.