So, this blog post is a bit out of my normal schedule that I've settled into lately, but that doesn't really matter because what is a schedule for a personal project anyway? There's no deadlines here, no expectations, and that's why this is a hobby.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that it's only just dawned on me over the past few days that I'm fast approaching my 25th birthday, I normally make jokes about my age along the lines of denying it, insisting that I'm still a teenager and going on about how you're only as old as you feel, but not in this case. To be clear, I know I'm still young, that people older than me have all crossed this checkpoint in life and that I (hopefully) still have quite a bit time left on this planet. It's just the idea of actually being alive for a quarter of a century that's kind of thrown me. (I promise after this self indulgent introspection I'll get to the point of this post)

I think the thing that's most getting me with this is that I never really bothered with the previous "milestones" so to speak, like sure, I celebrated my 18th and my 21st, but thinking back on that they were both just regular days to me. That also being said, while at uni my birthday was always during the last couple of weeks of semester 1 when a lot of assignments would be coming in, so I'd always put any celebration off until after exams, and then when it got to that point I felt like it had been too long since then to actually celebrate my birthday, and there's nothing in particular special about a birthday anyway, so why bother?

This one just feels different though, like 25 should mean something, that I'm wiser, more experience, moving onto a new stage, or I should be at least, but like everyone, I have no idea what I'm doing, I plod along from day to day, occasionally expressing these ideas, but for the most part filling my time with as much stuff as I possibly can so I don't sit idle and think about this kinda stuff, not because it's unpleasant, but because I feel it's unproductive.

I will say though, I will probably be celebrating my birthday this year, a lot of my university friends have graduated now, so that's less of an issue, and those who still are, thanks to how uwa has changed from a 13 weeks to a 12 week semester, my birthday now falls right on the study break, I guess it's fitting that the milestone I actually care about for some reason is one I feel comfortable celebrating.

That's all well and good, but what does this have to do with doing things the hard way?

I hear you asking, or maybe not, you did just read this though so I guess I forced you to think it? The temptation to go on a tangent about pink monkeys is pretty strong, but lets move on shall we?

First I should probably specify some parts of this statement. This pretty much only applies to where I can do things the hard way in my own leisure time. When at work, or doing something which others may want to use, I'll do my best to use libraries or ways that have been designed before.

I should probably also list off my current side projects: Currently, my main two projects are, Seagull, which is a sort of static site generator which can be found on my github, and an, as yet, unnamed budgeting program. Of course I've got a bunch of other one's, the beginnings of a msn clone type thing, specifically msn plus, which was something some friends and I spent ages playing around with back in the day, a webpage that kinda piggy backs off youtube, but fixes some of the stuff I'm not a fan of with the homepage/subscription feed and about 9 different starts of projects from where I decided I wanted to pick up a language, but never really stuck it through. There's more than likely more things, but that's currently it.

When I started writing this I had an idea of how I was to come to this big conclusion of how doing things the hard way means when you do it an easy way later on, but the easy way doesn't work exactly right, you can fall back on the hard way, but that doesn't quite seem right now that I think of it more. I mean, this blog is powered by Pelican, a /real/ static site generator, with markdown and everything, I've barely touched the theme, in fact, the changes I had made I don't think I've committed yet, so that's still coming itself

It's all about what you chose to do, the flexibility which comes with doing stuff from scratch, the sticking with the default, or somewhere in the middle.

Maybe I need to spend some more time soul searching, and then I'll issue an update to this post, I guess we'll see in a few weeks.

Until next time, cya around.

(yes, changing this one up a bit from my normal format)