Monthly Challenge for August, 2022: Healthy Habits for Happy Devs.

We're approaching summer and the exciting Hacktoberfest, let's take this month to recharge and recover. This month's challenge is all about nourishing our bodies, minds, and spirits so that we can become healthier developers.

Theme

Healthy Habits for Happy Devs

Goals

To end the month with:

Build a new habit that will make you a healthier dev, this can be mind and body centered (drink, move, read, meditate, rearrange your work station) or code centered (review your ReadMe, clean your code, refresh your GitHub repo) or both.
Set the goal for yourself this month and define what successfully completing the challenge looks like. For example, could be something like: review the README in 5 of your projects (one every week) or run 2k twice a week.

Daily check-ins- Are you hitting your goals?

Every day let's hold ourselves accountable by sharing our progress with the community. We will be using the slack channel for this purpose.

Who can participate?

Virtual Coffee's goal is to support all developers, no matter where they are in their coding journey. We encourage all members to participate. This challenge can be done alone or in a group.

How it works

Set your intentions - define and set a new habit you want to build
Start your habit and track your progress. There are several tools that will help you track your habits: spreadsheets, habit tracker apps or a habit journal. Pick the one that will work best for you.
Share your progress and celebrate every step. The goal here is to take baby steps. And remember that building a healthy habit is a process and that missing a day is part of the process.

How to share my progress?

Share your progress in the #monthly-challenge channel in Slack. While no other platform is imposed, it can be a good idea to also share on social media for more reach but only if you are comfortable to do so (Twitter using -or not- the hashtag #VCMonthlyChallenge, a personal blog, a post on DEV.to, you get the idea)

Sharing every time some work is added is a good idea, small progress is still progress. No need to write a detailed blog post: a 140 characters Tweet can be enough. For example: "Today I did 10m of meditation in the morning".

Tips for forming healthy habits

Start small - and make it easy so it's hard to say no. For example, you want to increase your water intake, start with a glass of water every morning.
Make it a schedule - block a time in your calendar to practice your habit
Track your habits - visualize your progress is great way to motivate yourself
Show compassion to yourself - remember this is a process and there will some steps back
Celebrate and reward your wins!