Wasted effort

The whois record for this website tells me I registered the domain name on March 11th 2012 at 21:56 - over 12,168 hours ago. In that time I have spent hour upon hour creating endless potential sites, all of which were simply, egotistical displays of my own work and thoughts. None of these designs ever progress further than a prototype, resulting in weeks of my time wasted - time which could have been wiser spent.

This all boils down to my perception that because I am a software developer, I must create my own website site. That if I use a template or theme it would look bad, like I am incompetent in my own field. This same thought has been in my mind while working on the majority of my past projects - activity avoiding the use of libraries, frameworks and open source code. All this does is slows down progress.

It is only in the last few months that I have realised the error in my ways. When a user interacts with an application they don't see what I see - a duct-taped together collection of libraries, frameworks, and themes - they see a solution to a problem.

One of the projects I am currently working on along with Weiran Zhang is called Castr, its a social podcasting app. I wasted several nights the idea that I could style this app myself. This was fantasy; it was never going to work. After many many nights of wasted effort we eventually spent $39 and purchased Flat UI Pro. Since then progress on the app has skyrocketed.

Using this same logic I have today, 507 days after buying this domain name, spent $19 and simpley purchased a design. It took me under 10 minutes to get it up and running.