As we approach the end of 2015, it’s time to reflect on all we’ve done and haven’t done. It’s time to let those domains for the stillborn side projects expire, time to purge the todo lists and prepare new ones, time to make promises to ourselves we know we’ll never keep.
These things take discipline, and as developers, we’re too curious about everything to properly cultivate it. We’ll do a good job when we’re paid for it, but when it comes to harnessing our own curiosity and just sticking to something just for the sake of sticking to something, we’re absolutely awful.
To help with disciplinary training, some of us resort to rigid todo lists, micromanaging every single sub task, which results in so many entries, a single missed day collapses the system due to mental overload in trying to catch up. Others try to kill off interests and old technologies, only to realize they’ve replaced them with new ones. It’s hard, no doubt about it. One of the projects that can actually help develop one’s discipline (and benefits the community), is 24 Pull Requests.
24 Pull Requests (called that because it encourages people to submit one PR per day, advent-calendar style, until X-mas) is an effort to unite all developers in a joint push towards open source contributions - a movement encouraging people to find a random issue in an open source project and fix it. This can be a typo in the docs, a bugfix, or an entire new feature - as long as it’s a contribution to someone else’s project, much in the spirit of Hacktoberfest. As we recently launched Sourcehunt, this is right up our alley here at SitePoint, and we’ll be doing our best to join in.
Needless to say, sticking with one PR per day for 24 days straight cultivates quite a bit of discipline and an incredibly positive habit, so jump right in if you feel like it’s something you could use help with. To sweeten the pot, if you manage to do all 24 in PHP projects, please get in touch and at the end of the effort and we’ll not only feature you in our end-of-year post, but also gift you three months of SitePoint Premium membership!
Will you be participating?