[styrmis]

This is really great! There are quite possibly many better ways to spend 180 days if you wanted to make money (#1 would probably be completing every Rails tutorial available) but I don't think that is important here. Rather, I find her approach inspiring and it's something that can be applied to any endeavour.

One nice thing that she will have, even if she doesn't make it through the full 180 is a record of her earliest creations through to her latest. Like when keeping a journal she'll be able to refer to it when she's feeling low and see the progress she's made, and she'll have a record of what she's done that transcends her memory.

At my first job I was lucky enough to report directly to the Technical Director of the company who took the time to mentor me on what it means to be a good software engineer. The first thing he had me do is to keep an engineer's journal. The benefits of this would only become clear a few weeks down the line but clear it was: I would encounter a problem I knew I had solved before but couldn't quite recall the solution to; I would flip back to find my notes and there it would be. Fast forward a few months, then a year and the value received from this simple act of keeping an organised journal far exceeded my expectations.

I have since kept the habit going but I feel that more can be done here. On one level you can keep notes for yourself and improve your own productivity. A level up would be to write those notes up on an internal wiki. One level up further and you've polished them into material you can publish to a wider community. One level up again you can inspire others to do the same through your efforts. One such effort that I have seen (outside of Jennifer's) that I think is completely worth anyone's time to explore is Journey of an Absolute Rookie: Paintings and Sketches (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=870), 10 full years of recorded progress of a beginning artist that blew my mind. Warning: you may lose a lot of time to that forum thread!

There is something beautiful and powerful in things that have been worked on and tended to for years, things that cannot be rushed no matter what: the only way to have 10 years of recorded progress today is to have started 10 years ago and to have kept it up for the duration. What a present to give to yourself!