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I've been a professional software developer for ten years, and I'm on a hiatus right now. One thing I've been doing with my time is reinvent a bunch of wheels,

I've been a professional software developer for ten years, and I'm on a hiatus right now. One thing I've been doing with my time is reinvent a bunch of wheels, implementing broken clones of this library or that algorithm, and I've gained a tremendous amount of understanding of what's going on behind the scenes of tools I'd been using for years. So yeah, it's a valuable learning tool to build with your own hands. Also, a valuable guide when deciding whether to write code yourself or introduce yet another library to your dependencies.

datavirtue 6y ago
Before getting sucked into the enterprise world, I reinvented a bunch of wheels and this indeed gave me a deeper understanding of the inner workings of various frameworks and technologies. I noticed that my colleagues who had ten years or more on their resume rarely had any idea what I was rambling on about or the basis for the things they were using. Their were so busy trying to get stuff done that they never had time to explore. I don't mean blog post or tutorial explore, I mean weeks and weeks of implementation and testing of patterns and low level engineering. Building database engines from scratch or writing a compiler or a distributed message broker, for instance.