Alright, so most times you catch me online, I’m probably sharing some dumb joke or a picture of my cat looking weird. You know, the usual stuff. Keeps things light. It’s easy to just fall into that rhythm, scrolling and sharing funny bits.
But the other week, I dunno, something felt different. Felt like I was just… consuming. Not really doing anything, you know? Scrolling endless feeds of memes, funny videos, whatever. It’s fun for a bit, but then you look up and hours have gone by. So, I thought, okay, let’s try something else for a change. Let’s try being… productive? Sounds weird even saying it.
Switching Gears
I decided I wanted to actually build something. Not something world-changing, just something tangible. I remembered my grandma keeps losing her recipes, scraps of paper everywhere. So I thought, maybe I can make a super simple little website thingy for her to type them into. No fancy stuff, just basic. Store recipe, find recipe. Easy, right?
Wrong. Oh man, was I wrong.
First off, I hadn’t touched any real coding stuff in ages. Fired up the old code editor, felt like staring into the abyss. Where do you even start? Spent the first evening just trying to remember basic HTML. Then CSS. My brain felt like mush. Found some tutorials online, started plugging away. Copied some code, tried to understand it. Mostly failed.
Got something showing up on the page. Looked terrible. Like something from 1998. Tried to make it look nicer. Spent maybe two hours just trying to get a button centered. Seriously. Two hours. The urge to just make a meme about CSS being impossible was so strong. Nearly caved, not gonna lie. Opened up my usual image editor, then stopped. No. Stick with the plan.
Went back to the code. Fought with it some more. Googled error messages that made no sense. Read explanations that felt like they were written in another language. Got frustrated. Walked away. Came back. Finally, finally, got the basic layout sort of working. It wasn’t pretty, but it resembled a webpage.
Making Something Work (Sort Of)
Next step was making it actually do something. Like saving a recipe. This involved backend stuff. More googling. More tutorials. More head-scratching. Picked a simple framework people recommended. Tried to follow the instructions. Things kept breaking. Error messages everywhere. Felt like the computer was personally mocking me.
- Tried setting up a database thing. Failed.
- Tried making a simple form submit data. Failed.
- Tried just printing “Hello World” from the server side. Took way longer than it should have.
But bit by bit, I chipped away at it. Got the form to actually send something. Then figured out how to catch that something on the other end. Then, miracle of miracles, managed to save it somewhere. Pulled it back out and displayed it. It was the slowest, ugliest recipe saving system ever created. But it worked. It actually worked.
Felt surprisingly good. Like, really good. Not the quick laugh you get from a meme, but something solid. Something I made happen, even if it was clunky and took forever.
So yeah. I guess the point is, i dont always meme. Sometimes I try to center a button for two hours and almost lose my mind. It’s definitely not as easy, and maybe not always as fun in the moment. But building that stupid little recipe thing? Felt worthwhile. Maybe I’ll even finish it properly for Grandma. Or maybe I’ll just go back to looking at cat pictures. Haven’t decided yet.
