I'm a do-it-yourselfer at heart.  I like to be in control and I don't like to have to rely on other people for things that I can do myself.  In spite of this tendency, I've learned that there are certain things that I should leave to others.

I live in Noblesville, a little town on the northern edge of the Indianapolis Metro Area.  At my last job I commuted 45-minute each way to my office on the west side of Indy.  Now that I work downtown I can take the bus, and I've realized that driving through rush hour is one thing that I definitely prefer to let someone else do.  It's a 15-minute drive to catch the express bus that drops me off 30 minutes later, two blocks from my office.

There are lots of benefits to leaving the driving to the pros.  I save on gas.  I don't have the expense of parking downtown.  I'm forced to be more disciplined about my work schedule.  Best of all, I can do other things while I ride; I nap, read, do work on my laptop--I'm writing this blog post on the bus!  My wife told me that I'm in a much better mood when I get home now than I was when I had to drive.

As a software developer, I used to want to build as much of my software as possible from scratch.  My excuse was that I wanted to understand every detail of how the software worked.  Now I've realized that I can be far, FAR more productive if I use a software library.  For example, here at Compendium we use the fantastic Yahoo! User Interface library in most of our front-end web application code.

Could I create a site that would be just as good without it?  Maybe.  If I could afford to spend months implementing every little feature.  I'd spend most of my time trying to fix browser compatibility problems.  The people who create YUI are individually expert in various aspects of web development; I would need to become an expert in everything.  It simply would not be practical.  I used to think that using a library was a crutch.  As it turned out, I have learned more about web development in less time by using YUI and learning from the YUI team than I ever would have going it alone.

What about improving search engine optimization for your company?  Could you create a ton of topic-specific blogs and manually fill them each with relevant content?  Sure you could.  But wouldn't it be better to spend less time worrying about SEO tricks and more time on your real job?  You should really consider leaving it to the experts here at Compendium Blogware.