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Reinvent the Wheel, then Display It Like a Trophy

Adrian Perea on July 16, 2020

People talk about "reinventing the wheel" as if it's some sort of curse. It's true: in this day and age, tons of libraries are already available fo...
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valentine • Edited

I think you raise quite a good point here Adrian, it's drilled into us not to reinvent the wheel, and then beginners are stuck with no projects to take on to show their skills.

Reinvent. Do it your own way, and as Adrian says - display it as a trophy.

If you decide you want to develop your own Linter just for fun, or build a web app that already exists just for the challenge - do it and be proud of your accomplishments!

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Adrian Perea

Glad we're on the same page, Val!

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valentine

Absolutely! And as an ex-Head Baker, that analogy was very relevant haha!

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Jonathan Yeong

Great points, I totally agree with you!

I also feel that reinventing the wheel makes you appreciate the technology that's out there already. For example, I'm rebuilding my blog and I realized there's a lot that goes into a CMS. I definitely take things like this for granted when it's a one click deploy for a headless CMS.

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Adrian Perea

Good point, Jonathan! I know of bicyclists who tear down their own bikes just to recreate it (exactly the same way) again. It's not just a matter of "what works". Appreciating the craftsmanship that's put into a piece of work is (I would argue) more important!

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Adrian Perea

I think this is one of the best routes to take for smaller teams. It gets more difficult when you work at scale. Working with proprietary tech increases onboarding time since it's harder to just find engineers who "know how to do the job".

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Michael Tharrington

This is such a cool post. Great advice!

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Adrian Perea

Glad you liked it, Michael!

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MxL Devs

Ever decided to use someone else's wheel, then spend hours trying to figure out how to put the wheel in?

Sometimes it's just necessary to reinvent the wheel and make it a better wheel.

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Adrian Perea

Exactly. Sometimes the shoe just doesn't fit.

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Marcell Cruz

Great post! What do you think is a good Wheel to reinvent ? 😂😂

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Adrian Perea

I work with AI, and one of the most fun I've had is implementing linear regression from scratch!