There is a particular kind of optimism required to build something yourself.
It starts innocently enough.
“I just want a WordPress theme that does what I want.”
That’s it.
Nothing unreasonable.
I didn’t ask it to cure cancer. I didn’t ask it to negotiate peace in the Middle East. I didn’t even ask it to make WordPress stop asking me whether I would like to edit my fucking website in six entirely different places.
I wanted one theme.
Ironically, I named it ONLY 1.
That should have been my first warning.
Somewhere around 250 hours later, I found myself staring at the thing I had spent weeks designing, building, testing, fixing, retesting, fixing the thing that fixing the other thing broke, and then fixing the thing that broke because we fixed the fix…
…and came to the calm, measured, professional conclusion:
FUCK IT. WE’RE REBOOTING THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING.
Meanwhile at NAJ Headquarters, Priscilla was presumably calculating how many human years 250 hours represents while carefully avoiding eye contact.
I was calculating whether throwing a computer through a window counts as an allowable business expense.
For the record, 250 hours is:
Ten and a half straight days.
No sleeping.
No eating.
No showering.
No staring blankly into the refrigerator wondering why you opened it.
Just WordPress.
Or, if you prefer the version where I occasionally behave like a mammal and sleep eight hours a night:
More than fifteen waking days of my life.
And what did I have to show for it?
A very detailed understanding of approximately 847 ways a WordPress theme can tell you to go fuck yourself.
That’s not entirely fair.
We built things.
A LOT of things.
Some of them worked beautifully.
Some of them worked beautifully until we touched something completely unrelated three menus away, at which point they apparently received word of the disturbance and threw themselves off a cliff in solidarity.
We had presets.
Heroes.
Sidebars.
Analytics.
Polls.
Reservations.
Galleries.
Image frames.
Media organization.
Menus.
Accessibility controls.
Enough settings to operate a moderately sized spacecraft.
And every time I thought we were getting close, something that had already been fixed would wander back into the room like:
“Hey, remember me?”
Yes.
I FUCKING REMEMBER YOU.
I fixed you Tuesday.
Eventually there comes a point in every project when stubbornness stops being perseverance and becomes hostage negotiation.
September 9, 2026 was that point.
I looked at the accumulated patches, regressions, fixes, fixes for fixes, and things we were afraid to touch because apparently changing a font might cause Reservations to invade Poland, and made the decision I had desperately not wanted to make:
Start over.
Not from nothing.
That’s important.
The ideas aren’t gone.
The designs aren’t gone.
The things I learned aren’t gone.
The giant list of “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT DO THIS AGAIN” isn’t gone.
But the build?
Yeah.
We’re burning that fucker to the ground.
Carefully.
Professionally.
With documentation.
Because apparently I’ve matured.
So ONLY 1 is being rebuilt from a clean foundation.
And this time, every piece gets added deliberately. Every approved feature gets regression-tested. Every build gets documented. And if adding a button somehow causes the fucking sidebar to disappear, we’re going to know exactly which button committed the crime.
I would love to end this Meanwhile with some profound entrepreneurial wisdom about failure being part of success.
I don’t have any.
I’m still pissed.
Ask me again after hour 251.
Meanwhile… at NAJ Headquarters.