Welcome to my blog!
This is my first blog post. It is also a story of how I beat procrastination.
I started building websites in 2014. It was nothing fancy. Just a few webpages using Joomla! - an open source content management system that allows you to build websites in a user friendly way - with a WYSIWYG editor and modules. WordPress was still in its blogging infancy back then - a tool for publishing blogs. You couldn't build full websites with them, or maybe you could, but the websites were quirky. I got my first paid gig a few months later to build a website for a pageant. That was how I began my journey as a professional website designer. Before then, I was designing poster graphics in Photoshop and Illustrator.
A few more paid website design gigs along the line, I decided it was time to build my own personal website. Afterall, what is a professional website designer without a website. I discovered SEO and decided it would be a good way to put my brand out there. It was on Thursday, 21st of May 2015 - ISIS had just taken over the Syrian city of Ramadi in Iraq, Osama Bin Laden considered leaving the Pakistani compound where he was staying before the raid by the US Navy seals, and David Letterman was going to announce his retirement from late-night TV after 33 years - that I bought the domain name for my website (stbensonimoh.com).
The plan was simple: leverage my graphic design finesse to create a logo, embed it in my website-to-be, and flaunt my portfolio like a peacock on display. A form for booking gigs would be the icing on the cake. But life had other plans. You know what they say: "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." Haha!
At this point, I had started taking courses in VFX and 3D animations and begun building stuff in Cinema 4D. My video editing and animation skills were improving rapidly. Then a friend who had some experience building websites and who was intrested in VFX Animations struck a deal with me - I'd teach him VFX Animations and he would teach me PHP - VFX lessons for PHP wisdom. I was limited by the Joomla! themes that were avaialable to me and I did not know how to build my own custom themes. So I paused building my website while we continued with the VFX projects. In that time, he introduced me to WordPress as an alternative to Joomla for building websites and I was sold! I decided to build my personal website with WordPress. Spoiler alert: I was smitten by the abundance of free WordPress themes.
I had relocated to a new city - Lagos - earlier that year, with the hopes of finding an animation job at a VFX studio. I had planned to have a career in VFX Animations while my webdesign skills would be used in designing my portfolio website. But work was not forthcoming and I had to survive by taking on webdesign jobs. I did that until early 2016 when I got a job at a new women WebTV that was planning to use VFX heavily for their broadcasting and video-on-demand. You wouldn't imagine that I built their websites. Haha! Work on my personal websites came to a grinding halt as I took on more responsibilities at the TV studio. Sadly, the studio closed shop by 2017 - 2 years later.
By this time, I was actively programming in PHP and MySQL and could edit any WordPress theme or build one from scratch. I started taking website building jobs again and integrated payment engines/systems as well. I would often get asked why I did not have a personal website, so I decided to put up something with WordPress. It was great looking - probably the best WordPress website I have ever built - but I wasn't impressed by it. I even rarely visited the site. Don't misunderstand me. WordPress is a great platform. I just felt like my website was too - basic. I was a programmer and felt like my website should reflect that - more features.
I started learning about Cloud Computing/Networking and could build and configure mail servers in AWS on a virtual machine with postfix, dovecot, MySQL, amavis, clamav, etc. Webservers were a walkover for me. In 2018, I got the Google Developer Scholarship (GADS) and my fullstack skills improved greatly. I started a consulting, building web apps with custom features or integrating custom features in WordPress websites by building plugins.
Then COVID happened. The timeline was blurred afterwards. I volunteered for not-for-profits and did my consulting on the side.
In 2020, I learned about JAM stack and found that I could build my website with React on the frontend, GraphQL for the API, and WordPress as the backend. It felt cool, so I took down my existing WorPress website. I didn't get to build my website immediately as I moved to another city to start over after COVID, while volunteering for not-for-profits as Consultant Chief Technology Officer and doing some freelancing work.
In the summer of 2021, I started working full-time again in tech and did not touch my website. Later, I discovered Gatsby and started building my website with the intention of using WordPress as the CMS. Then I found Markdown and was thrilled! I was going to use Markdown for the blog instead. Work stalled on the website for the whole of 2022. Perhaps because I was busy at my fulltime job, or because of procrastination.
This year, completing my website and launching it was a NEW YEAR RESOLUTION but I didn't get to work on it until last month. In that time, I had built and developed tens of websites to completion for others. With the year winding down, I decided to take action to beat procrastination. This post that you are reading is a proof of that.
Lesson: Get to do things immediately no matter what. I could have just gotten to it. I ended up doing something in 7 years that I could have done in a few weeks.
I hope you enjoyed reading this? There's more to come. ;)