When you are getting better at coding, it seems to be a tendency to start building your own things. After all, you know how it works, and it suits your needs just fine, right? After building so many custom engines was when I realized: “This is starting to suck“.
I originally had planned on making this blog a custom blog platform built of the amazing PHP Framework CodeIgniter. It was going to be a small, useful and simple blogging tool. I didn’t have plans to go big and expect more than 20 people to read my blog. So I began building it, and it was going great, simple, quick and built just for me. So I used it, started blogging a bit and fell back out. I posted great the first couple of days but from there on I kind of abandoned the blog posting habit. So I thought, let’s try WordPress for a change? What an incredible difference. No bugs, easy to install, secure, well built and it still did what I wanted to do. From there on, I’m excited to post when I have an insight or tip to share.
This was the experience that made me realize. I can’t out-do the WordPress community. They have thousands of plug-ins and active developers polishing this system all the way down to the link styles.
So a lesson learned: If you are going to make something for yourself, look out there and be open to options. Chances are someone is probably doing it a lot better than you currently are.