3 ms·

I never want to disparage people's efforts, but it is a recurring theme for people to unknowingly reinvent mtr.

• dredmorbius 3y ago
  Another lens is that reinventing or independently arriving at existing (and well-regarded) ideas, methods, systems, etc., is a validation of your own creative process. It's very difficult to stay on top of all available tools. I find that so long as it's something I can do with shell tools, awk, or other scripting environments I'm often better of inventing than searching as when you create your own tools you're addressing your own specific needs and constraints, whilst when evaluating a third-party tool, you have to undergo much the same process ("does this do what I want it to do?") often without the ability to readily modify the tool to fit a specific use case. That's not always true, but it often is. And of course, creation helps expand your own creative abilities. If mtr is frequently re-invented, that's a strong validation of the original concept as well.