25 coding goals for people learning to program and for working developers

Coding goals for beginners

Beginner goals are about writing code every day and finishing one thing.

• Code for 30 minutes a day for 30 days.
• Finish one beginner course from start to end.
• Solve 20 beginner exercises.
• Build a small program that takes input and gives an answer.
• Put your first project on GitHub.

Project goals

Project goals are the ones that teach the most, because a project has no answer key.

• Build 3 small projects from scratch, without a tutorial.
• Rebuild a simple tool you already use.
• Ship one thing that another person actually uses.
• Deploy one project with a README that explains it.
• Get one pull request merged into an open source project.

Practice and problem solving goals

Practice goals are small daily problems, the same shape as the puzzle counts in chess goals.

• Solve one coding problem a day for 30 days.
• Solve 100 coding problems in 100 days.
• Write 10 core data structures from memory.
• Read someone else's code for 20 minutes a day for a month.
• Repeat one small exercise 5 times until you can write it without looking anything up.

Code quality goals

Quality goals are habits, and a habit is easiest to build as a count of days you did it.

• Write a test for every new function for a month.
• Commit with a clear message on every day you code for 60 days.
• Go back and clean up one old project.
• Learn 20 keyboard shortcuts in your editor.
• Ask for a review on 10 pieces of code and apply what you are told.

Career and public learning goals

Public goals put your work where others can see it. Explaining what you learned is half of them, and that part belongs with writing goals.

• Do 100 Days of Code: an hour a day, with a post each day.
• Write 5 posts that explain something you learned.
• Give one short talk at a meetup or at work.
• Learn a second language well enough to build one project in it.
• Finish a portfolio of 3 projects and apply to 20 jobs.

What is a good coding goal?

A good coding goal ends with something that runs. A review of 35 years of goal research found that specific, hard goals lead to higher performance than being told to do your best. "Get better at programming" has no finish. "Ship one project another person uses by 1 June" does.

Projects feel too big until they are split up. A to-do app is a list, a way to add to it, a way to tick things off and a place to save it. Breaking a goal into smaller ones is the same skill as breaking a program into functions.

The best known coding goal is a day count. The 100 Days of Code challenge has two rules: code for at least an hour every day for 100 days, and post your progress every day. The second rule is doing real work. A review of 138 studies found that monitoring progress had a larger effect when it was reported in public.

How to track coding goals

Tick off the day once the code is committed. That review of 138 studies found that people who monitored their progress reached their goals more often, and that recording it beat keeping it in your head.

Coding days are a day count, and a 100 day challenge is the classic length. Problems solved and projects shipped are amounts.

A commit graph shows that you typed. A picture that fills up one day of coding at a time shows how close you are to the number you chose.

Frequently asked questions

What are good coding goals for beginners?

Code for 30 minutes a day for 30 days, finish one beginner course, and build one small program of your own. Building something without a tutorial, even something tiny, is the step that shows you what you have learned.

What are the rules of 100 Days of Code?

There are two. Code for at least an hour every day for the next 100 days, and post your progress every day. The rules were written by Alexander Kallaway, who started the challenge.

Should my goal be hours or projects?

Both. Hours make sure you practise. Projects make sure the practice goes somewhere. A simple pair is an hour a day and one finished project a month.