I fell in love with Ruby On Rails at the beginning of 2006 when I was trying to find a way to implement the idea for my final year project. I had touched PHP previously for one other project and before that, mainly coded in C++ and Java.
So when a friend asked me to create a website for him, the idea that I ran with was to try to code my own cms for his site using Ruby On Rails. And it was a painful experience. The result was a half-baked CMS. I honestly didn’t appreciate the scope of the project until I took it on and tried to juggle work, my leisure on weekends and coding the CMS.
Recently, I tried using Wordpress as a CMS for another site by customizing it with a template and some plugins. The final result was much better than my first attempt at building a website with a CMS to manage it.
And I think the two experiences have made me just a bit wiser with regards to coding. While one may get a sense of satisfaction (i.e. ego boost) building something entirely from scratch, there are times when it may be smarter and no less satisfying to build on the work of those who have come before. And that is the beauty of the open source movement. It provides great tools for people to build on the work of others and share that new work so that others can build on it.
The important question at the end of the day is this. Are there already tools out there that can do what is required. If there is, then to use a proverbial phrase, “there is no point reinventing the wheel”.
JasonL | 25-Jan-07 at 5:36 pm | Permalink
Yes, I too begin the punishing way of coding by learning the programming syntax in detail to create everything from scratch. After a while, I found that there are so many wheels out there already skillfully done. Now, to do something, I look for wheels and understand how the wheels turn. The end result is the satisfaction, and not how many of lines of code you have created. The smiles on the user’s face - priceless…