I also saw my project mentor launching his own website<\/a> for people to keep in touch with him. After he did that, he said to me: \"Chai Heng, I think you should start one too.\" <\/p>\n With that motivation and a little bit of confidence, I started picking up php (which is more economical than Java in terms of web hosting), HTML as well as CSS while doing up some design prototypes in order to create a not-so-ugly website. <\/p>\n Three years neither a long nor short. Quite a bit had happened to Techcoil.<\/p>\n Year 1<\/strong> of Techcoil was more of a show-what-I-know website. I listed all my accolades, some of my projects and write a few pages about this and that. One month later, I integrated WordPress into my website and wrote my first blog post<\/a> on Techcoil. <\/p>\n Year 2<\/strong> of Techcoil was a period when I started to write more blog articles and plan for the next version. At this point in time, I had sort of gotten the hang of documenting some of what I had tried in my work into my blog. The content of the blog grew and I started to see the principle of temporal locality taking place when I constantly reference back what I had wrote while building new things.<\/p>\n Year 3<\/strong> of Techcoil was a major overhaul. I removed most of the \"about this and that\" kind of pages. I included 3 new sections:<\/p>\n I also remodeled how my server would serve the HTTP requests directed to Techcoil: including the ones that are responsible in rendering this page. Finally, I reworked the look and feel of the web pages.<\/p>\n There are some lessons that I had gotten from creating and running Techcoil for the past three years.<\/p>\n For three years, I had been paralyzed by my own analysis. Prior to the first launch, I had been scraping my design prototypes: this colour is not nice; that way of arranging the elements is not creative; that instance variable should not be named as such and so forth. In short, I had been procrastinating and damming my progress. <\/p>\n One fine day, I decided to set Techcoil's launch date as 10th October 2010 and told myself that I would just put up whatever I had done for Techcoil at that point in time.<\/p>\n There is no such thing as a perfect plan, time just keep ticking away. As long as I am about 30% ready, I should just proceed on with my objectives; things will naturally fall in place after that, as long as I keep putting in effort. <\/p>\n I don't rely on people to help me create my website design, I don't rely on people to code my entire website for me. I just dive into the waters and get my hands dirty. <\/p>\n Relying too much on others will often hinder my progress. Why wait for someone at that expert forum to give me an answer to my problems when I can be faster at finding the answer myself?<\/p>\n Even when I want to ask for advice, shouldn't I have something visible for people to judge?<\/p>\n My workflow for growing Techcoil is to put up things that I will use in future. Perhaps, I could had found out how to go about telling that browser how to detect mouse clicks<\/a>; or how to create a web server in C# to serve HTTP requests<\/a>. Yes, I know, there could be some article on the web that does the same thing, but am I able to find it back easily again next time? <\/p>\n In order to give me a one stop access to what I had done, I will create blog articles<\/a> to remember the various techniques of doing things. And as I hate people plagiarizing my work, I will center the blog articles around proof of concept scenarios which I had created myself. <\/p>\n For me, I don't aim to get as much traffic as possible. Is this technique useful in the future? Yes, blog it. Is there a tool<\/a> which can help me in my current work? Yes, just build that.<\/p>\n They say it is helpful to list down some objectives publicly so that I can be on my way to achieving them. Well, looking ahead, I want to see Techcoil with:<\/p>\n Till then.<\/p>\n And lastly, whoever you are, I thank you for reading this far. It is my pleasure to have you here on Techcoil. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n Time flies, it had been 3 years since Techcoil started running. Choosing 101010 to launch Techcoil had been significant to me: in both binary and decimal aspects, it is a easy anniversary date for me to remember. I guess that is how I can remember to chunk some thoughts on this day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[172,173,174],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/me-at-chillon-castle.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p245TQ-5f","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Major milestones in the last 3 years<\/h2>\n
\n
What have I learnt from Techcoil.com?<\/h2>\n
I am a big fat work in progress<\/h4>\n
Be independent, do not rely too much on others to help me<\/h4>\n
I will always have at least an audience for my output if I make them for myself<\/h4>\n
What is next for Techcoil.com<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
![\"Facebook](\"\/ph\/img\/3rd-party\/social-icons\/Facebook.png\")
Share\n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n ![\"Twitter](\"\/ph\/img\/3rd-party\/social-icons\/Twitter.png\")
Tweet\n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n ![\"Linkedin](\"\/ph\/img\/3rd-party\/social-icons\/linkedin.png\")
Share\n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n ![\"Pinterest](\"\/ph\/img\/3rd-party\/social-icons\/Pinterest.png\")
Save\n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n <\/ul>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"