Part of Me

“I know you well.
You are a part of me.
I know you better than I know myself.
I know you best,
Better than anyone.
I know you better than I know myself.”

So I have finished and “launched” Opiate Media. The site where I will review the wonderful media of this world.

Original and awesome I know.

Just to be unnecessarily redundent I will probably post here a link to anything I do there.

Doing this reminded me of an important life lesson I have tried to stick by as of late.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

I am programmer. I love doing it. I love the challenge of it. I love building stuff. 

This unfortunately often gets in the way of actually getting anything done. At an actual job (that thing with the paycheck) this is generally not a problem, but when doing my own stuff it always is.

I am not the only one with this problem, I know plenty of other programmers who get caught up in building a better wheel. While it’s a fun pursuit, most will get board and find something else shiny to play with never getting done what they started out to do.

Sure there is sometimes need for a better wheel but in general you can reach the goal with the wheel you have ( OK beat to death the wheel thing ).

The goal was to get a site up. I could have written my own blog software (have in the past) and done my own site design. Neither of these was really the goal though and would have taken time and energy away from what I really wanted to do. 

So use what is already available. When I am doing a java project that needs a DB I use hibernate, I don’t write my own DB layer. In this case there is plenty of easy to setup and use blog software (WordPress in this case) that come with good quality themes.

So I used someone else’s wheel and reached the goal. 

To summarize: Avoid shiny objects and don’t forget what you’re actually trying to do.