I hardly ever got myself involved in writing challenges. I preferred writing at my own pace and soaking myself in each step of the process—creating an outline, writing a first draft, editing, etc. Such a beautiful process! Writing challenges seemed boring to me—until now.
On December 15th, 2024 Sunkanmi Fafowora reached out and asked me to participate in a writing challenge with him. The idea was to write an article every day for the next seven days. For reasons, I can’t place, I instantly agreed to it! In hindsight, I think I was just moving on vibes.😂
In this article, I will share what I enjoyed while participating in this exercise. No lessons here (at least not in the formal sense), just stuff I enjoyed.
The Articles I Wrote
Before proceeding, these are the articles I wrote during the challenge:
What is a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and How it Helps Your Application
The Basics of RESTful APIs: A Beginner's Guide to Modern Web Communication
Feel free to check them out if they interest you. I promise you will enjoy them.
What I Enjoyed About Participating in the Writing Challenge
Writing an article is always enjoyable for me. But writing these articles has been much more enjoyable. I found every aspect of the experience interesting, and I'll do my best to explain why.
Deciding on Topics to Write About
When Sukanmi texted me, I had no plans to write articles for the rest of the year. I had only one topic in my drafts to pick from. I literally didn’t know where to start from.
After the first day, I ran out of topics and spent half the next day thinking about my next article. Eventually, I decided to write about Golang. I am currently learning Golang so it made sense to document my journey.
I wanted to follow the Golang pattern for the entire challenge, but I remembered giving a talk on backend development early in November. During my talk, I mentioned the importance of understanding the Internet to improve your chances of being a successful backend developer.
After very little deliberation, I decided to focus my articles on the basics of the Internet. I figured it made sense to try and help people with resources around understanding the Internet as I mentioned during my talk.
I enjoyed every bit of this, especially the moments of uncertainty. They made me feel somewhat alive.
Every Day Being a Deadline
I take deadlines as my archenemies and I do everything I can to beat the shit out of them. But consistently having to deal with impromptu deadlines plus personal deadlines and work (excluding a lot of things) was a lot.
I spent longer hours sitting and working on my computer to beat my archenemies. Beating each deadline was a thrill. But then I had a relapse with my back pain and practically had to restart my physiotherapy sessions. This happened after the second day of writing and I could barely do anything meaningful.
By the time the seven days were complete, I had written only five articles. I beat five out of seven deadlines. I felt annoyed but I still enjoyed it all. The old me might have given up after the relapse.
Consistent Reminders from Sukanmi
Sukanmi played a huge role in helping me get by. It was refreshing being accountable to him and also holding him accountable. We sometimes faced similar issues and laughed about it. One time, his code wasn’t working and he had to write an entirely new article barely 2 hours to the deadline. Overall, it is an experience I will pay to have again.
Sukanmi’s Articles
Sukanmi wrote seven nice articles and you should check them out:
Conclusion
Throughout the challenge, I kept realizing the same thing over and over again—I love technical writing. I hope to get more involved with intentional challenges like this in the future. It was a fun ride and I enjoyed every bit of it!
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can reach out to me on X!