I used to be the type that would like to build things from the ground up. I’ve since moved away from doing that…heres why. Although I’ve always been an advocate for learning the lower level intricacies of things, there comes a point where it slows you down from developing work- and that’s where you should stop and reevaluate what your end goal really is, and if it’s even reachable. This happened a billion times with me. Just setting this site up is the best example. I lost track of what I wanted to accomplish here, which is a simple blog and showcase for my work. I ended up spending dozens and dozens of hours learning primitive steps to getting a web server up and properly making sure the client gets what I post…had I just set up a WordPress blog, this would have saved time. Sure I did learn something, but I have better things to learn…especially if I know I won’t apply this to other things. I won’t see myself as a sys admin, not now, not ever. I’d rather spend this learning time on getting decent progress on my other projects…so, lesson learned. Just to give you an idea of the struggle I’ve went through with building this site: I’ve messed around with Namecheap for DNS resgitrations, Github for static site hosting, Amazon’s AWS with a full on LAMP stack (Linux, Apache for the webserver, MySQL for future database usage, and PHP for server side scripting), and many, many other things. I ended up realizing I don’t need to put up with all of this crap, I just want an easy to manage blog and professional portfolio of my work…so I found the perfect combination of Namecheap, Jekyll, and Github.

To add on, I will say that learning the lower level schema of anything can be beneficial if you know that having such a deeper understanding will allow you to become a better worker in that field. Looking at you, C language. A perfect example of this for me is my Integrated Appliance System. I’ve probably spent over 50 hours working on this on the side, but I’ve learned things I wouldn’t have had I not learned to build a PCB from the ground up, or integrated the dozens of ICs with my microcontrollers instead of just using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. But that’s just me.