In my learning, I find it immensely helpful to set lofty (but possible and measurable) goals. I didn’t my goal for the month of May but it was pretty straight-forward, publish a gem. I accomplished that goal, twice.

I’ve decided to talk about my goals out for the month of June since they are much more challenging than my goals for May. First, I want to publish a “useful” gem/plugin/program/app. Second, I want to make some contribution to an open source project.

Both of these are a little subjective, so let me define further. I define “useful” as someone other than myself uses it. Not just downloads it, actually uses my creation. Now, since I can’t control whether or not my contribution to an open source project is accepted, I will be a little more loose in that definition. I want to issue a meaningful pull request on a public repo that has multiple contributors.

I realize that the above are huge challenges for a beginning programmer, but I wouldn’t get anywhere if I only tried to do comfortable things :)