I find that when I work with a framework for a while, I do start to understand it very well. I find myself looking at the implementation more and more as I lea

I find that when I work with a framework for a while, I do start to understand it very well. I find myself looking at the implementation more and more as I learn the subtleties about how it is written. After a while I start to feel as familiar with it as code I have written myself, if not more so because I interact with it so often. At that point, it's basically free code. You get the benefit of all those lines of code, but you get to outsource a lot of testing, debugging and development. In short, after working with the framework a little, I have thousands of lines of code that are better tested than my application, better vetted by more programmers, and many edge cases handled I might not even realize I have. I might only use half the code, but I'm glad it's all there, and I'm glad I can focus on getting down to work instead of writing yet another framework.