One nasty aspect of the advice "Don't reinvent solutions to common problems" is it doesn't really provide a way to tell when your problem is really, truly a com

One nasty aspect of the advice "Don't reinvent solutions to common problems" is it doesn't really provide a way to tell when your problem is really, truly a common problem, which can be a lot more subtle than you might think. Sometimes the simplest single requirement change - say, works in low memory environment, or handles high latency, or utilizes a GPU, or has a good public API, or has low battery usage, or can save its entire state to disk, or is skinnable, or supports other random feature X - can instantly take all common solutions to a problem and invalidate them. But just as often, it doesn't. Or, just as often, you have to just give up on those requirements for pragmatic reasons.