When I arrived at the startup I'm at now, we used a "bespoke" backend for interacting with AWS SQS. It was a pile of code that was written that had no value to

When I arrived at the startup I'm at now, we used a "bespoke" backend for interacting with AWS SQS. It was a pile of code that was written that had no value to the function of the startup. Switched it to an OSS bus and dumped a bunch of bespoke code. I regret not pushing harder for the CTO to avoid even more bespoke code for some of the admin interfaces that we ended up building for internal tooling which probably would have been better in something like NocoDB. The value of the startup is rarely in the bits and pieces themselves (very few are), but the process or data flow that the startup models with those bits and pieces and some pain point or business value that gets added in doing so. One thing I have come to appreciate in startups is that it's better to even spend $10,000 to learn fast rather than to wait 3 months to come to the same conclusion. To put it another way: if you could see 3 months into the future for $10,000, would you pay it? Instantly. So if there's a shortcut that can -- with a high degree of certainty -- remove obfuscations of the path to take, you take it.