Justin Lilly

The concept of bankruptcy is a common one in the online world. It has a similar meaning to financial bankruptcy, though not quite. It typically happens when something reaches critical mass and you just can’t take it anymore. For me, its the mental road blocks to productivity and connecting with the greater community. 

If you followed the blog previous to this one, you would know that my posts all but stopped due to “working on a blogging platform”. Effectively creating a CMS from scratch as is the right of passage in the django community. For some, its a fun test of newly acquired skills, and for others, such as myself, its a pit of unproductivity.  

The last statement warrants a bit of explanation. I’ve entertained the idea of writing my own blogging engine since I first messed around with rails 2-3 years ago. Its simple and covers most of the major bases in web application development: authentication, reading and writing from the database and form processing. The downside for me, however, is there are so many possibilities beyond that. Image uploading, embedding of videos, populating the blog with community work such as svn and git commits, and the list goes on. I found myself not releasing a product, but constantly “improving” on the software. 

No more. I’ve installed wordpress, a sensible theme and I’ll be using it until the wheels fall off. No more “but I need feature X.” Wordpress can do practically everything and the thought of developing in PHP is bad enough that I’ll not be tempted to hack on the internals.

So here’s to being productive by removing the stumbling blocks in your way.