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My takeaway is that there are benefits to in-housing your own tools, not that everybody should. There's also a middle-ground available in the software industry
by _bxg1 8y ago
My takeaway is that there are benefits to in-housing your own tools, not that everybody should.
There's also a middle-ground available in the software industry: reading the code of the open-source tools you use. You can understand how your tools work without rebuilding them from scratch. Also, if you're using open-source (which most people do these days), the "cheaper" argument doesn't apply.
- hinkley 8y agoThose smoke jumpers aren’t making their own nuts and bolts, ropes, cloth, or felling their own trees. They’re making tools by assembly. Many of us work the same way. From what I understand every master craftsman has a small quantity of tools they either made themselves or at least modified to purpose. Tools with bits added on or ground off (eg, wrenches ground thin for tight spots, or magnetized). I class jigs as a separate category but I have no handy parallel for software.
- mike12345 8y agoA software equivalent to jigs, might be something like specialized project templates available in IDEs and the like.
- jmiserez 8y agoUtility functions and small self-contained libraries. Nice thing about software jigs is that copying them is free, so often they’re open-sourced.
- matwood 8y ago> From what I understand every master craftsman has a small quantity of tools they either made themselves or at least modified to purpose. I could argue editors we all use for coding are tools that we 'made' by assembly. My set of plugins and settings is different from the next person.