I’m a fan of the probably-apocryphal Jerry Seinfeld “don’t break the chain” advice. It works for me — I even have an app for it.

I’ve written at least 750 words for 661 days straight (2,329 if you don’t count the times I paused for a few days for Burning Man); jotted down two things that made me happy that day for 1,025 days straight (3,688 without Burning Man — more than a decade!); done vibe checks for 662 days straight (942, ditto).

And now: 365 days of at least 1 code commit pushed every day (even the day my child was born — of course after wife and baby were asleep!).

A commit is not a good measure of code volume or quality (it could be a tiny copy change or a huge feature), but it is a binary outcome. Every day for the last year, I sat down and did at least something in code, big or small.

I think I am a much better engineer for it.

I also simply enjoy coding, and having a serious practice to make time for the things I enjoy is nice, too.

Visakan Veerasamy has a great idea he harps on: do 100 things. You should read the post and watch the videos at the bottom. He happens to be opposed to the “don’t break the chain” approach, but the point stands. Doing something 100 times — or 365 times — will inevitably teach you something.

It’s not even hard! You can just decide to make an omelette every day, or push a tiny commit, or make a tiny watercolor, and by the end of 100 days (and certainly a year), you will be vastly better at it, have learned some interesting things, and really not even spent that much time.

I will note, though, that the only streak-like daily practices that work well for me are those really short ones — definitely less than fifteen minutes required, and preferably less than two. A commit, 750 words, 2 things, and vibe checks can all be done in less than 20 minutes total if need be — and I always have 20 minutes.

I also sometimes keep track of streaks of longer-duration tasks, but they inevitably break sooner, and I don’t beat myself up about it. There are days sometimes where it just doesn’t fit my priorities to hew to the routine. But it feels great to have long-running streaks of the shorter tasks.

In closing: is this post really just an excuse to post my perfectly-green GitHub graph? Sure is. I might as well memorialize it somewhere, because undoubtedly, at some point, I’ll break the chain.

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