In a letter a college classmate sent me soon after we graduated, she commented that she wasn't too surprised at what I was doing after graduation, since I didn't ever seem to be content to follow the easiest path. What this was in response to was that I had decided to do some volunteer work for a while, instead of looking for a job. Moreover, rather than accept an offer from an outfit in sunny San Diego, I was headed to Washington, DC, to live (and work) at the Federal City Homeless Shelter, close to the Capitol.
It's not entirely true that I consistently avoid the path of least resistance. In fact, much of my interest in computers from early on was because of a strong desire to make things easier for myself (and others). A consultant for one of my employers during high school said that he thought that quite a number of people became interested in technology because they were inherently lazy and it allowed them to do certain tasks more quickly and easily. I don't know if I include myself in that group, either, but I have found myself thinking many, many times when confronted with a repetitive task, "ugh, this could so easily be automated".
However, I do believe there is often much to be learned from taking a more involved, considered approach. When I decided to start this blog, I could have installed WordPress, like most people would, and be done with it. Instead, I built this site using Pico CMS. It's a smaller, faster system that doesn't use a database, but requires a bit more manual configuration. I had been using Skeleton as a CSS template for an earlier version of my site and decided I like its elegance and simplicity, so I carried it over to the new site. Neither Pico CMS nor Skeleton is inherently designed to work with the other, so I have had to do some tweaking to get the site looking at all reasonable and I will have to do more in order to get it more to my liking.
One of the best parts about using Pico CMS is that I can work on a new post, save it to the web server running on my home network, and then when I decide that it's "ready for prime time", copy that one file to this site (which is hosted by Dreamhost). Another advantage of having Staging and Production sites available is that I can fiddle with the settings on the Staging one as much as I like and when I'm ready for the world to see my changes, I just copy the modified files over to Production. This is a development approach that I've tried to employ as much as possible in the past and have found that it works quite well.
I had actually started creating every new page on this website in HTML and found it became pretty laborious surprisingly quickly. When I decided I wanted to begin creating some blog posts, I realized that approach wasn't going to lend itself to anything close to effortless writing, which led to a search for a suitable blogging system. One funny thing about choosing Pico CMS is that after finishing the install, I then noticed in the documentation that it said this: "Pico is not blogging software - but makes it very easy for you to use it as a blog", and then it supplied some code, along with a note, "you probably want to do something like the following ". Undeterred, I pasted the code where it needed to go, tweaked it a little to make it look acceptable, and then started writing. Now I'm able to write every new page on my site in Markdown instead, so I don't get bogged down with all the various tags necessary for HTML. So, I'd say that my overall approach is to try to maintain a balance of saving myself at least the same amount of effort as the effort I'm adding by having to learn something new. Regardless, though, the end result is me learning something new!