If you can't reinvent the wheel on company time, I would urge you to try and do it on your own time. You don't necessarily have to use the solution you come up

If you can't reinvent the wheel on company time, I would urge you to try and do it on your own time. You don't necessarily have to use the solution you come up with, but it helps to get a deeper understanding of the code beneath the libraries you use. Using this technique definitely made me a better developer when I was younger. I still like to take small portions of libraries I use and try to code them myself, just to get a better feeling for how things work (even if the code is vastly different from the library I use).