Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.

He would have said the same of this blog too. What started as a “simple blog” project, transformed into a “Building a fullblown website and content management from scratch” project. Net result? 0 ROI.

From this experience, here are the key takeways for wannabe folks like me.

1. Focus on your goals To improve my technical learning and writing skills, I wanted to start a blog. But being a techie, I felt I am a little over qualified to use blogging sites like wordpress/blogger and thought I should code my website from scratch. Good idea, only caveat is, I started spending my time trying to solve the wrong problems. CMS, static websites, zero code, responsive pages, are all very interesting topics and I learned a lot, but I didn’t learn what I planned to learn.

   So, when you start with a goal in mind, do regular course corrections to make sure you are still on the right path to reach your goal.

2. Choose your weapon and stick to it I hopped from Jekyll to Hugo, from Ruby to Go to write my own theme (Forget reuse, go ahead and reinvent the wheel. huh!). All these are very facinating technologies, but we cannot learn them all at the sametime. It is very easy to lose ones way in these plathora of technologies.

   Hence, it is very critical to stay focused on the task at hand and push the distractions to a backlog list for future consumption.

Mistakes are the stepping stones for learning. As long as we are learning, we are growing.