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Don't reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels
Software industry does not have a true love for wheels, inventing wheels, and less than everything for reinventing the wheel. Anyway, that's often necessary to really understand how things work.
“Don't reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels.”
The quote is by Jeff Atwood (aka @codinghorror).
What do you think about it? Did you ever try to build something that already exists, just out of curiosity, or to understand it better? How did it go?
I've recently written a Promise polyfill.
I didn’t need it, it was not an urgent task, I didn’t have timelines, I didn’t have requirements about performance, weight, or anything else… it was a really fun, and instructive experience.
These days I'm publishing on youtube a video series of myself, live-coding it.
This is the first video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_p-PVNqhZE, Any thoughts?
- Piskvorrr 9y agoHere's the entire thing: https://blog.codinghorror.com/dont-reinvent-the-wheel-unless-you-plan-on-learning-more-about-wheels/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/dont-reinvent-the-wheel-unless... I've built plenty of wheels (servers of various protocols mostly), and one thing that I learned is that making things easy is hard - e.g. the protocol may not be well defined, or the user agents might have their quirks, or abuse it outright; the end user won't care, so the server needs to accomodate.
- rasmus1610 9y agoI'm currently building a link shortener just for fun. There are plenty of link shorteners out there but I just like to work on it for the sake of it
- bruscopelliti 9y agoDo you hava something visible on GitHub? I am curious :)
- rasmus1610 9y agonot yet, but I can send you a link later if you want :)
- tmaly 9y agoEach situation is different. If you work for a company where there is a lot of red tape when it comes to bringing in outside code, you may have to re-invent the wheel quite often.