Perfecting my personal website has been a problem that has been bugging me for a long time. It was a problem not because I don’t know enough, It was because I knew too much! Let me elaborate.

I’ve been a web developer for a long time. I started out with simple HTML, taught myself CSS and JavaScript. In early 2021 I got an opportunity to contribute to a PHP web application, that prompted me to master PHP on the fly. In short, I’ve seen it all and done it all. When it came to my own website, I wanted nothing short of impressive. I wanted it to be a demonstration of all my skills. So, I started the tedious process of coding a blog from scratch.

That was in 2023. Guess what… Life happens, priorities change, time flies. All I had was a home page with some flashy JavaScript elements. Don’t get me wrong, it looked very cool! And I am proud of every bit of effort that went into every line of code. But, it did not demonstrate my skills to the level I wanted to and it was definitely not worth spending almost an year for development.

So, last week I made the decision to hang up my pride and install WordPress. In 2 days I had the home page content sorted out and on the 7th day I am drafting my first blog post. I am back on track where I should have been a year ago. Had I made this choice back then, I can only imagine where I could have been today.

Moral of the story is, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Technology is improving at such a fast pace, that it is now more important to learn and embrace new tools and techniques as they come out. Ignoring them will only lead to you being left behind by a world that is eager for the next new thing.

While my story about accepting WordPress may have no significance, the moral applies to everything in technology. Case and point, LLMs. ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-pilot. Many have used them and I’ve heard opinions in both sides of the spectrum. Large corporations are looking into handing over critical operations, while developers think of them as party tricks. Regardless, I think AIs are now out of the box. Best way forward would be to accept them with a grain of salt.