BYOB – Build your own blog???

A few months ago, Rob Conery laid out a challenge. He challenged developers to build their own blogs. Why? Well he had several reasons, but the best one was one he gave on twitter:

“Luke had to build his own lightsaber – geeks should have to build their own blogs. And that should be their resume.”

So what has this got to do with me? Well, my resume could stand some updating, and this seems like a pretty interesting way to start. So I am going to start on my own blog engine. And to keep me on task, I am going to keep a public record of my progress on my blog, much as I am with my current project for work. In addition, I will also make the code public on Github.
But, I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket. So to sharpen my skills even further, I have decided that I won’t just build my own blog, but I’m going to build it three times. In three different language. Giving it the exact same feature set in each. I intend to build it using ASP.Net, Ruby, and PHP. See, I know ASP.Net pretty well, however, I’ve never written any code in either PHP or Ruby. So I figure this would be a great time to learn.
For now, I’m still in the requirements gathering stage. I’m in the process of deciding what features I like from other blog engines, which ones I don’t like, and what things I think are missing altogether. When that is complete, then I will start organizing features and user stories and start implementing them one at a time in each of the three languages. It will be interesting to see how things progress. Will I be able to make all three feature equal? Will they look the same? Will the perform the same? Only time will tell…