I had a question via direct message via Facebook this week about my prototyping and proof of concepts, and why I do so many of them, showing people that things can be done and how they are done.
The reasons are two-fold: first, I like to prove to myself that I can achieve something. I usually have a good idea immediately if I think it can be done, or maybe within 20 minutes searching hooks, filters, and functions.
The second is to have it most of what I do is a proof of concept, it shows it’s possible, and it can work; it doesn’t deal with all edge cases and all other circumstances, but i store these in Gists, Upnote or GitHub depending on there size, ready for me to dust off for a project, article or video.
I still wouldn’t call myself a developer, but I enjoy pushing myself and my understanding, and none of it is wasted time, what I don’t reuse is there if I think I want to use it later, a lot of my prototypes have been repurposed to do other works, I only needed for example to understand how to read products and price ids once in surecart before I can do this with mutliple products.
Some of these prototypes are so popular that they become plugins for sale on https://reallyusefulplugins.com. I don’t see any of this as wasted time; it is increasing my skill, my code bank and in some ways helps people prove something is possible, or I may just publish the code in my articles or in a video feature. Most importantly, I enjoy it. There is no need to do it, I want to do it
