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Discussion on: Invest in building custom tools

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Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Edited

When my company Monsterbox was a web-dev firm churning out web-apps it was mandatory on paid time to contribute to internal tools.

We had our own project manager which generated invoices, based on associating git commits with tickets (3poch)

We had our own web-framework which was a high level dsl that allowed you to use either Angular 1 or Mithril as the engine (monster-mithril, monster-javascript)

We had our own secret tool which allowed you to generate our entire applications using a yaml file (think CloudFormation but for web-apps).

That's just to name a few.

The problem was I never found developers who actually wanted to work on these internal custom tools, even though the business outcome was extraordinary and return to developers who have been less work, larger contract, larger salaries.

Since the motivation was not there, these tools couldn't keep pace which the changing landscape of the industry, never created the documentation or the marketing effort.

They are still amazing tools but sit in my graveyard.