Off-the-shelf mindset

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:16

Carrying on from my previous post, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about how my mindset has changed in the last year with regards to building websites like this one.

Whenever I've wanted to build a website, or any web-based system before I've always felt the urge to write my own systems from scratch, be it in PHP or Python. I'd look around at what was available to do the job for me, but always feel like anything off the shelf would leave me in a straight jacket of either working within the limits of the original developer's ideas, or worse, working within someone else's code to make it do what I want!

I think that may be more of a reflection on what kind of programmer I am. I really don't like working on other people's code, perhaps because I've learned everything I know by myself so haven't really picked up the team work coding skills that I might have in university.

At the same time, I don't think I'm a born coder. I'm far too easily bored by doing the same thing all day! I've always found setting up servers, etc to be way more fun.

In February I changed jobs. I've gone from mostly coding all day long to mostly poking at servers and all kinds of other stuff. I hardly code at all these days, except bits of PHP and SQL to build interfaces for set top boxes and a few other things.

And an interesting thing has happened. When the time came to build the website for the current project I'm working on, the idea of writing pages of code to do it was really unappealing. Instead I revisited Plone and had a play with it, downloaded some modules to add some functionality and generally loved it. It's just like configuring a server!

That brings us to the restoration of this site, and so the natural choice for me was to use Plone again. I feel liberated! I've always accepted the Linux kernel is the way it is without wanting to write on myself, so why shouldn't I accept a prebuilt web publishing system?

So, I think I've concluded from this that I've found my natural role with technology, I'm an integrator, not a creator. Give me a challenge and I'll find all the building blocks and glue them together. And that makes me happy!

Though this does leave me with a sense that I'm not creating anything these days. And that's a big part of why I've brought the site back.