A New Personal Best: What Six Months of Locking In Can Do

Table of Contents

• Setting a New Benchmark for Myself


• My Most Productive Six Months Yet


• 
  2 Hackathon Wins
  
  
  
  
  • GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge Win: Metal Birds Watch
  
  
  • Notion MCP Challenge Win: NoteRunway
  
  
  
  


• Raised Money for Charity


• Became an Engineering Manager


• Collected More Than 25 Stars on My GitHub Repositories


• Beat My Own Record in Terms of Likes per Article


• One Article Made It Into the Top 7 of the Week


• Got Accepted into the Virtual Coffee Community


• To Sum It All Up


• Zero Luck, All Hard Work


• Share Your Wins and Achievements, and Set a New Benchmark Starting Now

Setting a New Benchmark for Myself

This short piece serves as a quick reminder of what my current benchmark looks like in terms of how much I should aim to do and achieve within a six-month period for it to feel successful.

Six months is a solid amount of time, you can accomplish a lot in that window. I'm not someone who tends to look back too often, but every now and then, it's important to check in with yourself to make sure you're still moving forward and not slipping backward. And slipping backward is never a good sign.

Some people might argue that just because you've been successful during a certain period, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll keep improving from there.

And that is true, there's no doubt about that. Sometimes things just go south, and we fail to achieve even half of what we set out to accomplish.

But that's the whole point!

Success doesn't teach us much, failure does. Failure is where the most important lessons come from. So set your standards high. If you fail, don't worry about it. Every failure is a lesson, and the more you fail, the more opportunities you have to learn and grow.

My Most Productive Six Months Yet

At the beginning of the year, I made a pact with myself that the first half of this year would be the most successful period of my life. Plans often don't work out, but this one worked like a charm.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm still not fully happy with myself, I feel like I could've done even better but still, it's good enough for now.

Here are the most important things that happened during that time:

2 Hackathon Wins

If I set out to do something, I want to succeed every way possible, whether it's industry work, writing code, writing articles, managing people, or presenting my work. I had already done all of that, but I had never participated in a hackathon.

As a long-time member of the DEV Community, I was well aware of the dev challenges and hackathons that occasionally pop up, especially after the merge with MLH. That felt like the perfect opportunity to finally go after that goal.

And boy did it turn out even better than I expected.

GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge Win: Metal Birds Watch`

But I pushed through it and finished the project anyway.