I have a habit of getting interested in things I don’t fully know how to do.
One day, I might be thinking about a website. Then I start wondering how difficult it would be to build one myself. Before long, I’m looking at designs, trying different tools, figuring out how things work, and imagining what I could make if I got everything right.
This is how I ended up working on a few different websites and projects. With Zunheboto Social, the idea was to create something useful for a local community. With Nutmeg Press, I wanted a place for football news, match reports, analysis, and opinions. I also worked on 8thpc.in, a website built around an 8th Pay Commission salary calculator that people could use. At different times, I’ve tried building WordPress themes and even worked on a football manager game.
These are very different projects, but they started the same way. I could have left all of them as notes in my head, and at some point I decided I wanted to try making them real instead.
I don’t have a technical background that gives me all the answers. A lot of what I do involves asking questions, trying things, making changes, and figuring out what went wrong. Sometimes I know what I want, even when I have no idea how to get there.
When I think of a new website, I can picture how it should look and what people should be able to do with it on a phone or a computer. The hard part comes when I try to turn that picture into something that works. A design can look right in a preview and behave differently when the website is live. A feature might work until I refresh the page. Something I thought was fixed can become a problem again, and even a small change can lead to another issue I did not expect.
Building WordPress themes brings its own challenges. Getting a theme to look the way I imagined is one thing, while making sure its settings work properly so people can change things without breaking the design is much harder. The football manager game project takes me into a different set of problems altogether, with game systems and player data that all have to work together. There is a lot more to it than simply having an idea for a game and deciding how it should look.
I have also tried using AI tools to help build these things. They can make parts of the process easier, especially when I don’t know where to start. Still, asking an AI tool to create something is not the same as getting a finished product that works the way I need it to. I have to test what it produces, find the problems, and work out how to fix them. Sometimes I have to explain the same issue more than once.
Not every idea has to become a finished project. Some things take more time than I expect, and others bring problems I didn’t think about at the beginning. There are limits to the time and attention I can give to different things, even if I like seeing what happens when I actually try an idea out.
There are moments when I wish I understood more before starting a project. I could probably make better decisions, avoid certain mistakes, and explain what needs to be done more clearly. The more I work on websites, themes, and the game, the more I realise how many small details go into making something work properly. It takes patience, testing, fixing things, and sometimes changing the approach entirely.
I don’t have a neat answer for every problem, and I don’t always know whether I’m doing something the best way. Sometimes I need help, and sometimes I have to rethink what I was trying to do. I would rather admit that than pretend I understand everything.
For now, I’ll probably keep coming up with ideas and working on things that interest me. Some will turn out the way I hoped, and others might not. I don’t know what every project will become, or which ones I’ll still be working on a few years from now. I just know that when I think of something I’d like to build, I want to find out whether I can make it work. So I start, even when I don’t know everything I need to know, and then I figure out the next part.
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