Introducing Streak Club and draw with me for a year

Today I'm launching a new website called Streak Club. It’s a site for anyone tohostcreative streaks (I'll explain below). Check it out athttp://streak.club

Why

Over the past few years I've come to realize the importance of setting andkeeping regular goals for self improvement.GitHub’s contributions chartwas the first time I experienced this.

In 2014 I participated in something calledWeekly Beats. I challengedmyself to write a song every week for the entire year (along with ~300 othermusicians). By the end I was able tocomplete 51 pieces of music, each atleast 2 minutes long. In the beginning of 2014, when I started, I wasn’t sure Iwould be able to do it. I was fairly new to writing music and it took me a fewhours to get 1 minute of music written and sequenced. Now that the year isover I realized it was an incredibly powerful motivator. I've now writtenmultiple hours of music, experimented with a handful of software and hardware,and gotten experience recording myself playing instruments.

Weekly Beats is not running in 2015. They appear to run it every other year.I'm okay with that, but at the end of 2014 I was thinking how I could continueto capture my motivation. I decided that I would do a year of daily drawing.

What’s a streak

I call themstreaks, but they go by a few different names. I think I wasfirst introduced to the idea withSeinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain”trick.Chains.cc is an existing implementation of the idea. Whateveryou call them, it’s the act of setting a very regular schedule for yourselfto accomplish something, then seeing how long you can keep thestreak going.

I've builtStreak Club forcreative streaks. Any kind of activity thatproduces something. The site works by having you pick start and end dates, setthe interval (currently either daily or weekly), then finally invite others toparticipate or do it solo. The website gives you the deadlines, a chart of yourprogress, and the means to submit your work.

Any kind of medium is accepted. Upload images, upload audio, embed videos, orjust write some text. If you have any ideas for other types of media I'd loveto hear them.

I'm focussing on creative streaks because I think having people create andshare all kinds of unique content really builds a strong community. When I didWeekly Beats I thought I was just signing myself up for a year of work. Inreality I was signing myself up for just that, but also a supportive communitywho was eager to give feedback and help me grow. I was definitely not very goodand quite a beginner, yet people still went out of their way to encourage meand comment. I would be honored to foster the same kind of community on StreakClub.

Streak Club was designed with exchanging feedback in mind. It’s easy to send asignal to content creators that you like what they're doing to keep them going.Leave a comment if you've got something to say, or just click the heart to likeit.

I opened the site up for a few people before officially launching it to getsome streaks going, here are a few you can check out:

• Daily Art Warmup — Assorted daily drawing for a month
• Vegetable Streak — Drawing vegetables for a week
• Fruit Streak — Drawing fruits for a week
• Pixel Fonts — Creating free pixel art fonts for a week

While implementing the site I realized there’s the potential for a lot ofinteresting twists to the idea. One of them was the idea ofmacro streaks andmicro streaks. A macro streak might be a year long one, with a generic goal(make art), and a micro streak could be a week long one with a specific theme(draw vegetables). Because the two could potentially overlap, I made itpossible to submit single submissions to multiple streaks at once. I'm curiousto see how this plays out.

Let’s draw for a year

Because I want to learn to draw by practicing every day for a year I builtStreak Club. I made it so many people could join streaks to share inencouragement and feedback. I originally planned to launch the site January 1st2015, but I'm about a month late, oops. I decided to do a 1 month warm-up fromJanuary 1st to the 31st to give me a chance to fix any lingering bugs.

It’s calledDaily Art Warmup. I encourage you to join and try it out,even if you don’t plan on sticking around, it’s worth getting a feel for how itworks in case you find a use for it later.

Come February 1st 2015, 365 days of art begins:Daily Art 2015. The rulesaren’t strict, and it’s not a competition. It’s about you creating art dailyand communicating with others who are also trying. If you miss a deadline oraren’t available, no big deal, you can request a late submit link.

I'm looking forward to seeing all the art along with other ideas people come upwith for Streak Club.

Technology

Streak Club is the culmination ofmany of my projects that I've been buildingover the past few years. (Yes,I'm repeating myself from my itch.io post,but it’s still true.) I've used an almost identical stack to itch.io, it’sproven to be very reliable and I have no intention of switching anytime soon.

The entire project is a web application written inMoonScript. It runs onNginx throughOpenResty using theLapis web framework. I assembledthe project, about 10k lines for the initial launch, over the past month.Unlikeitch.io, this projectis open source, licensed under GPLv2.

The primary database is PostgreSQL, queries are handled by the pure Lua driverI wrote,pgmoon. As the site is very image focused, images aredynamically resized using techniques I outlined inNginx image processingserver.

Thanks for reading about Streak Club, I hope you check it out:http://streak.club