In my first post (!), I briefly mentioned the supression of my own ego, and it’s something I’d like to elaboration on. Read on for my thoughts on ego, coding, and swallowing your own pride…

With many of the computer projects I work on, I find myself writing code from scratch. I do this for several reasons: it is a good learning experience, I know I can end up with exactly what I want, and, most importantly (though I am often rue to admit it), I get bragging rights when I’m finished. I am slowing coming to terms with this, thanks in no small part to the realization that others go through the same thing.

Those of you less familiar with the technology world and open-source might not know of industry pundit Eric S. Raymond. Raymond has been involved with open-source for almost as long as I have been alive, if not longer. He has written many, many documents on the subject, and is currently working on a book called The Art of Unix Programming. Chapter 2, entitled "On Not Reinventing the Wheel", discusses the importance of not creating your own code every step of the way. Whatever the project may be, there is a good chance many other people have spent hundreds or thousands of hours writing code, debugging, and polishing their own versions. Why not tap these resources? Even if a project does not match your requirements exactly, you can still start off with a substantial portion of the codebase already in place.

What does this have to do with starting my own weblog? At the moment, my personal website has makeshift ‘blog on the front page. In actuality, I hacked together a PHP script that pulls topics from a phpBB forum. I can use the phpBB backend to do all the work of comments and SQL INSERTs and UPDATEs. I was letting phpBB do all the work; I just sat back and let the front page populate itself. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

In retrospect, I was pushing phpBB in a direction it didn’t really want to go. I got some good practice with CSS-based design, and a few complex SQL queries never killed anyone, but phpBB never seemed like it wanted to work with this other script. At one point, I added BBCode functionality to the script. Why do that, when HTML is a perfectly reasonable thing to use? I guess it was one of those, "Look at me, I did this!" things.

So now, I have Movable Type, which is showing itself to be quite robust and flexible. I have set up a second weblog for one of my roommates, I have begun writing draft posts, and I’ve started tweaking the default templates. Looks pretty good to me. And all I had to do was install it.

I could get used to this.