The moment I learned how to program, I wanted to experiment with my new super powers. Building a BMI calculator in the command line wouldn't cut it. I didn't want to read another book, or follow any other tutorial. What I wanted was to experience chaos. Controlled, beautiful, instructive chaos that comes from building something real and watching it spectacularly fail.
That's why whenever someone asks me how they can practice their new found skill, I suggest something that might sound old-fashioned in our framework-obsessed world. Build your own blog from scratch. Not with WordPress. Not with Next.js or Gatsby or whatever the cool kids are using this week. I mean actually build it. Write every messy, imperfect line of code.
A blog is deceptively simple. On the surface, it's just text on a page. But underneath? It's a complete web application in miniature. It accepts input (your writing). It stores data (your posts). It processes logic (routing, formatting, displaying). It generates output (the pages people read).
When I was in college, I found myself increasingly frustrated with the abstract nature of what we were learning. We'd implement different sorting algorithms, and I'd think: "Okay, but when does this actually matter?" We'd study data structures in isolation, divorced from any practical purpose. It all felt theoretical, like memorizing chess moves without ever playing a game.
Building a blog changed that completely. Suddenly, a data structure wasn't just an abstract concept floating in a textbook. It was the actual list of blog posts I needed to sort by date. A database wasn't a theoretical collection of tables; it was the real place where my article drafts lived, where I could accidentally delete something important at 2 AM and learn about backups the hard way.
This is what makes a blog such a powerful learning tool. You can deploy it. Share it. Watch people actually read the words your code is serving up. It's real. That feedback loop, the connection between your code and something tangible in the world, is irreplaceable.
You don't need tutorials anymore.
So how do you start? I'm not going to give you a step-by-step tutorial. You've probably already done a dozen of those. You follow along, copy the code, everything works perfectly, and then... you close the browser tab and realize you've learned almost nothing. The code evaporates from your memory because you never truly owned it.
Instead, I'm giving you permission to experiment. To fumble. To build something weird and uniquely yours.
You can start with a single file. Maybe it's an index.php that clumsily echoes "Hello World" onto a blank page. Or perhaps you're feeling adventurous and fire up a Node.js server with an index.js that doesn't use Express to handle a simple GET request. Pick any language you are familiar with and make it respond to a web request.
That's your seed. Everything else grows from there.
The Problems You'll Encounter
Once you have that first file responding, the questions start arriving. Not abstract homework questions, but real problems that need solving.
Where do your blog posts live? Will you store them as simple Markdown or JSON files in a folder? Or will you take the plunge into databases, setting up MySQL or PostgreSQL and learning SQL to INSERT and SELECT your articles?
I started my first blog with flat files. There's something beautiful about the simplicity. Each post is just a text file you can open in any editor. But then I wanted tags, and search, and suddenly I was reinventing databases poorly. That's when I learned why databases exist. Not from a lecture, but from feeling the pain of their absence.
You write your first post. Great! You write your second post. Cool! On the third post, you realize you're copying and pasting the same HTML header and footer, and you remember learning something about DRY (don't repeat yourself) in class.
This is where you'll inevitably invent your own primitive templating system. Maybe you start with simple includes: include('header.php') at the top of each page in PHP. Maybe you write a JavaScript function that stitches together HTML strings. Maybe you create your own bizarre templating syntax. It will feel like magic when it works. It will feel like a nightmare when you need to change something and it breaks everywhere.
And that's the moment you'll understand why templating engines exist.
I had a few blog posts written down on my computer when I started thinking about this next problem: How do you write a new post? Do you SSH into your server and directly edit a post-1.json file with vim? Do you build a crude, password-protected /admin page with a textarea that writes to your flat files? Do you create a whole separate submission form?
This is where you'll grapple with forms, authentication (or a hilariously insecure makeshift version of it), file permissions, and the difference between GET and POST requests. You'll probably build something that would make a security professional weep, and that's okay. You'll learn by making it better.
It's one thing to write code in a sandbox, but a blog needs to be accessible on the Internet. That means getting a domain name (ten bucks a year). Finding a cheap VPS (five bucks a month). Learning to ssh into that server. Wrestling with Nginx or Apache to actually serve your files. Discovering what "port 80" means, why your site isn't loading, why DNS takes forever to propagate, and why everything works on your laptop but breaks in production.
These aren't inconveniences, they're the entire point. This is the knowledge that separates someone who can write code from someone who can ship code.
Your Homegrown Solutions Will Be Terrible
Your blog won't use battle-tested frameworks or well-documented libraries. It will use your solutions. Your weird routing system. Your questionable caching mechanism. Your creative interpretation of MVC architecture.
Your homemade caching will fail spectacularly under traffic (what traffic?!). Your clever URL routing will throw mysterious 404 errors. You'll accidentally delete a post and discover your backup system doesn't work. You'll misspell a variable name and spend three hours debugging before you spot it. You'll introduce a security vulnerability so obvious that even you'll laugh when you finally notice it.
None of this is failure. This is the entire point.
When your blog breaks, you'll be forced to understand the why behind everything. Why do frameworks exist? Because you just spent six hours solving a problem that Express handles in three lines. Why do ORMs exist? Because you just wrote 200 lines of SQL validation logic that Sequelize does automatically. Why do people use TypeScript? Because you just had a bug caused by accidentally treating a string like a number.
You'll emerge from this experience not just as someone who can use tools, but as someone who understands what problems those tools were built to solve. That understanding is what transforms a code-copier into a developer.
We've Lost Something Important
Building your own blogging engine used to be a rite of passage. Before Medium and WordPress and Ghost, before React and Vue and Svelte, developers learned by building exactly this. A simple CMS. A place to write. Something that was theirs.
We've lost a bit of that spirit. Now everyone's already decided they'll use React on the frontend and Node on the backend before they even know why. The tools have become the default, not the solution.
Your blog is your chance to recover that exploratory mindset. It's your sandbox. Nobody's judging. Nobody's watching. You're not optimizing for scale or maintainability or impressing your coworkers. You're learning, deeply and permanently, by building something that matters to you.
So here's my challenge: Stop reading. Stop planning. Stop researching the "best" way to do this.
Create a folder. Create a file. Pick a language and make it print "Hello World" in a browser. Then ask yourself: "How do I make this show a blog post?" And then: "How do I make it show two blog posts?" And then: "How do I make it show the most recent one first?"
Build something uniquely, personally, wonderfully yours. Make it ugly. Make it weird. Make it work, then break it, then fix it again.
Embrace the technical chaos. This is how you learn. Not by following instructions, but by discovering problems, attempting solutions, failing, iterating, and eventually (accidentally) building something real.
Your blog won't be perfect. It will probably be kind of a mess. But it will be yours, and you will understand every line of code in it, and that understanding is worth more than any tutorial completion certificate.
If you don't know what that first blog post will be, I have an idea. Document your process of building your very own blog from scratch. The blog you build to learn programming becomes the perfect place to share what programming taught you.
Welcome to development. The real kind, where things break and you figure out why. You're going to love it.
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