Alright, so let’s talk about this “jays landing” thing. Man, what a ride that was. It started as one of those “should be simple” projects, you know? Famous last words, every single time. I figured, hey, I’ll whip up a nice little spot on the web, a personal landing page, maybe for some notes or to show off a few bits and pieces I’ve been working on. Keep it clean, keep it quick. That was the plan, anyway.
I jumped right in. Picked out some tools I’d been hearing about, thought I’d give ’em a spin. Seemed like a good way to learn something new while getting this page up. First few days, things were actually clicking. Got the basic structure down, felt pretty good about it. “This ain’t so bad,” I told myself. Ha! If only I knew.
Then the little snags started popping up. First, it was just getting the navigation bar to behave. Spent an entire evening on that, just trying to get it to sit right on different screen sizes. You fix one thing, two other things break. Standard stuff, I guess, but it starts to wear you down when you thought you were on a roll.
The Big Idea That Went Sideways
I had this idea for a really dynamic section, something that would pull in data from a couple of different places and display it all fancy-like. Sounded super cool in my head. In reality? It became this massive time sink. Instead of focusing on getting the core “landing” part of “jays landing” solid, I was wrestling with APIs and trying to make JavaScript do things it probably wasn’t meant to do, at least not with my level of patience at the time.
And don’t even get me started on the styling. Making it look decent was one thing. Making it look decent on my desktop, my old laptop, my phone, and my partner’s tablet? That was a whole other level of pain. I swear, I must have rewritten the CSS for the main content area about five times. Each time I thought, “Okay, this is the one,” and then I’d check it on another device and just groan.
This is where it really started to feel like a slog. My nice, clean codebase? It started getting… messy. Quick fixes here, commented-out chunks of code there. That classic “I’ll come back and clean this up later” promise I kept making to myself. We all know how that goes. “Later” is a mythical time that rarely arrives for those kinds of tasks.
- Too many half-baked features I tried to cram in.
- Not enough planning before diving into complex parts.
- Getting bogged down in tiny details instead of the bigger picture.
There were definitely a few evenings where I just shut the laptop and walked away, thinking “Why am I even bothering with this darn thing?” It felt less like building something and more like trying to untangle a giant knot of fishing line in the dark.
But, you know, you put enough hours into something, and it’s hard to just completely abandon it. I did eventually scale back some of my grander ambitions for it. Focused on getting the essential bits working. Got the main page to a point where it, well, landed. It wasn’t the amazing, all-singing, all-dancing creation I’d initially envisioned, but it was something.
So, “jays landing” today? It’s there. It exists. It’s a bit rough around the edges, sure. Some parts are clunkier than I’d like, and there’s a mental list of improvements as long as my arm that I’ll probably never tackle. But it works, for the most part. It taught me a heck of a lot, mostly about humility and the importance of keeping things simple, especially when you’re just trying to get something out the door. Every time I look at it, I’m reminded of the process, the frustrations, and yeah, even the small victories. And that’s a practice record in itself, I reckon.
