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"If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what." was Joel Spolsky's take. He wrote an article on the topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

"If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what." was Joel Spolsky's take. He wrote an article on the topic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...

alberth 7y ago
Where do you draw the line though on what’s “core”. Let’s imagine you’re a software shop that sells a SaaS app. Something like Slack as an example. Should you roll your own dedicated compute for your SaaS app or use AWS? Should you roll your own web framework, or use Rails/etc? Should you use AWS for file storage of Slack media files that are uploaded, or roll your own dedicated storage solution? Edit: I have the upmost respect for Joel. His company created their own Programming Language because they felt it was so core to their business to do so [1]. As did Facebook did with Hack. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/01/wasabi/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/01/wasabi/
- npo9 7y ago
  This really depends on what the company wants to adopt as “core”. They cannot be great at everything, so they must be careful in picking what topics to be experts in. For example, maybe the Slack like app wants to be able to upload, distribute, and archive huge computer files. Everyone has tried to upload a file to an email, slack, or discord message and was told the file was too large. Our platform is going to be the platform for sharing 1TB sized files for collaboration purposes, with the goal of supporting 10TB in summer 2020 and 1PB before 2022. The company should 100% make their own network protocol for transferring files.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- madhadron 7y ago
  Hack for Facebook isn't really a good example of this. It, along with HHVM and kin was more of a mitigation of the fact that there was too much PHP to rewrite.
- Spivak 7y ago
  * Is your business managing hardware and data centers? No, so you use 3rd party hosting. * Is your business developing and maintaing a general-purpose web framework? No, so you pick one off the shelf. Once you have your product, have proven your market and have a healthy customer base you can start thinking about optimizing your verticals. * Maybe your cloud hosting bill is enormous because of your workload and it turns out that colocating at a local data center will be a lot cheaper so you migrate. * Maybe you realize that none of the current web frameworks make your devs feel productive and they keep having to fight the tooling to accomplish what they want. If you find that you're carrying a lot of patches for your framework maybe it's worth your time to have someone working full-time to upstream them. If you think it's completely lost then it might be worth it to hire a team to work on building a new one.
  - alberth 7y ago
    >>”Is your business managing hardware and data centers? No, so you use 3rd party hosting.” So should Dropbox roll its own storage solution, or use cloud hosting - based on your statement?

alberth 7y ago

Where do you draw the line though on what’s “core”. Let’s imagine you’re a software shop that sells a SaaS app. Something like Slack as an example. Should you roll your own dedicated compute for your SaaS app or use AWS? Should you roll your own web framework, or use Rails/etc? Should you use AWS for file storage of Slack media files that are uploaded, or roll your own dedicated storage solution? Edit: I have the upmost respect for Joel. His company created their own Programming Language because they felt it was so core to their business to do so [1]. As did Facebook did with Hack. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/01/wasabi/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/01/wasabi/

npo9 7y ago
This really depends on what the company wants to adopt as “core”. They cannot be great at everything, so they must be careful in picking what topics to be experts in. For example, maybe the Slack like app wants to be able to upload, distribute, and archive huge computer files. Everyone has tried to upload a file to an email, slack, or discord message and was told the file was too large. Our platform is going to be the platform for sharing 1TB sized files for collaboration purposes, with the goal of supporting 10TB in summer 2020 and 1PB before 2022. The company should 100% make their own network protocol for transferring files.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
madhadron 7y ago
Hack for Facebook isn't really a good example of this. It, along with HHVM and kin was more of a mitigation of the fact that there was too much PHP to rewrite.
Spivak 7y ago
* Is your business managing hardware and data centers? No, so you use 3rd party hosting. * Is your business developing and maintaing a general-purpose web framework? No, so you pick one off the shelf. Once you have your product, have proven your market and have a healthy customer base you can start thinking about optimizing your verticals. * Maybe your cloud hosting bill is enormous because of your workload and it turns out that colocating at a local data center will be a lot cheaper so you migrate. * Maybe you realize that none of the current web frameworks make your devs feel productive and they keep having to fight the tooling to accomplish what they want. If you find that you're carrying a lot of patches for your framework maybe it's worth your time to have someone working full-time to upstream them. If you think it's completely lost then it might be worth it to hire a team to work on building a new one.
- alberth 7y ago
  >>”Is your business managing hardware and data centers? No, so you use 3rd party hosting.” So should Dropbox roll its own storage solution, or use cloud hosting - based on your statement?