As a programmer, I often feel the funnest part of the job is when you're writing new code, but at the same time, it's often more efficient to search for an exis

As a programmer, I often feel the funnest part of the job is when you're writing new code, but at the same time, it's often more efficient to search for an existing library. This internal conflict between what's enjoyable and what's efficient often leads down a path of least enjoyment and efficiency (e.g., writing a library whose functionality already exists and then seeing it die and replaced by open-source alternatives after many person-years of wasted effort). As a side note, I'm one of the creators of a tool called Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com https://sourcegraph.com) and this post actually captures a big part of the problem we're trying to solve. Being able to jump to def and find references / usage examples across open source makes reading / understanding / grokking code a lot more fun and efficient. Would love to hear people's thoughts.