Why You Shouldn't Code Your Own Blog (And Why I Did)
When I was a kid I wanted to be a writer, but I became lazy instead.
Well… not exactly.
I loved to read as a kid and of course, I knew little about technology. Those were simpler times, back in the days when my dad would print me Wikipedia pages from his office, since household internet wasn’t widespread# yet. My ambition was to become a writer and author a bestselling novel, not that I understood the magnitude of such a dream. Ignorance is definitely blissful.
I loved to write too, probably because I loved to read so much. I loved to make little worlds and then explore them, write about them. The first time I decided to make my own blog though, was back in 2018. It was a pretty lame one but hey, I was 13.
In some parallel universe I’m an internationally acclaimed bestseller-pumping writer with a lot of admirers and maybe even a sentient cup of coffee as my literary agent.. Well, maybe not the coffee. Not that it matters, since I stopped blogging soon after. And then I lost interest in writing for years to come…
Why You Shouldn’t Code Your Own Blog
It was back in 2017 when I first started to learn programming. Before that I made games using Stencyl using a Scratch-like visual scripting language, which just didn’t feel right… So I started to learn Python.
I needed a lot of help at first, but I slowly got better at this new “hobby” and moved on to learning web development, making tiny cross-platform games. Which was when I decided to start a blog.
And then, I complicated things.
This is something a lot of beginners probably do: they decide to do things from scratch, with no help. I was the same. I initially started a tech blog on Wordpress. It is quite embarrassing how naive I sounded im them. But naivety is forgivable. In the coming weeks I posted many blogs, hoping to somehow shake the internet with them (so cute). And that was when I started to go down the downward spiral of… reinventing the wheel.
Reason 1: Reinventing the wheel.
I realized, back then, that I could make my own little site instead of depending on Wordpress. Which was arguably the worst decision of my life.
I began writing code for my very own blogging site right away, using basic HTML (I was literally a kid), scouring through the internet to find the best tutorials I could to make a blog. I actually ended up making a decent blog, with Firebase and I even used React. And it only took me… 2 years!
Yeah, I wasted 2 years reinventing the wheel instead of producing creative content and documenting my progress. Not to mention, the blog lacked many crucial features. Insert me facepalming myself violently here.
Reason 2: Support and community.
While I made my blog in React, it did not have any of the community features blogging sites generally offer. Not even comments, thanks to me wanting to do everything from scratch. As a result obviously nobody read my blog! I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting. I’d love to have a serious talk with my younger self about making saner decisions. Although that isn’t physically possible.
Reason 3: Self-imposed constraints.
Building that blog made me initially limit myself. I stopped seeing the big picture, focusing on details, micro-managing everything.
I can probably list a huge number of learning opportunities I had, that I lost due to this mindset.
For starters, I lost my will to pursue game development for a while due to the fact that using a game engine felt like cheating. I ended up not learning machine learning years before I did, thanks to not wanting to use YOLO for a personal project. Most importantly, writing became a burden.
While I honed my basics a lot due to that mindset, my efforts were mostly invisible. Humans are social animals, and the compulsion loop is quite precious to our monkey brain. Not getting that precious feedback really demotivates you.
To conclude… The worst part about a downward spiral is it looks like a circle from the top.
So you don’t even know when you’re going down one! Which is something I never checked, while working on my own blog (and many other projects).
Why I Developed My Own Blog
Over the years I’ve disciplined my mind enough to finally let myself build new things without being paranoid and wanting reinventing all of it. And it’s finally paying back now. I’m finally starting to see the results of some of my projects (something worth writing another blog of its own on), and my monkey brain is definitely loving that.
To commemorate the journey that I have gone through to gain this mental discipline I decided to do what originally began that downward spiral: start this blog. Unless you’re reading this on some other site, you can observe for yourself that I have developed a completely functional blog, with comments and all.
And how I did that is by accepting the fact that I don’t have to do everything myself and that it’s okay to depend on others. That I can express myself, is great feeling by itself, which helps in squashing the little voice that persists in screaming “hey, you’re cheating! Go write your own full-stack app first!!!” Having suppressed that voice, maintaining a blog has once again become a hobby for me.
I used Jekyll to make my static blog along with Giscus to add comments to it. Instead of wasting time on developing it from scratch (which I can, now) I decided to go easy, and focus on what is important, which is you guys. Though it took years for me to realise what I did the hard way, I hope it doesn’t take that long for you.
Notes:
- At least in India, internet use was much less common before roughly 2010. And I didn’t really get exposed to it much before 2015.
- I don’t discourage anyone from making their own blog from the base up. It’s definitely portfolio-worthy if you’re a full-stack developer. Though it’d probably be more impressive to make a blogging site rather than a personal blog. Maybe I should write that down somewhere…