I have a tendency to want to build things from scratch. Its fun to explore and run with ideas on how I would go about building an UI for displaying articles and modifying content, and I would probably really enjoy spending hours trying to develop these tools, but for now I have better things to do with my time.
For the longest time I avoided using blogging tools. To me it felt like cheating, just spinning up a VM and installing WordPress. Development is a process, and without going through the process of writing my own tools, how would I be able to learn about the fascinating intricacies of managing articles?
As of right now, I’ve written at least three different blog engines that store markdown pages, tag content and featured some semblance of a text editor. They’ve been great learning experiences on various frameworks, but they just don’t hold a candle to fully realized modern blogging applications.
I’ve accepted that using blogging tools doesn’t diminish my skills or make me less of a developer. Instead, they allow me to focus on what truly matters… Actually creating and publishing content.
There will always be a part of me that wants to dive into a stylesheet and craft the perfect navigation menu, but the effort goes unoticed. By embracing these tools, I can spend more time investing in actually learning new things that actually matter.
In the end, it’s not about how the content is managed but rather about removing barriers and focusing on the quality the content itself so things actually get done.