I find it very strange and telling when people tell me that a dev shouldn't "re-invent the wheel", "roll your own" or "leave it to the experts" while simultaneously promoting substandard own-rolled projects by other people that simply got popular.

Kind of a strange elitist double standard that encourages a bad mindset of "I can't be as good as them" and it's toxic.

If you wanna make your own framework / package / etc, just do it, it might even be better.

It's all relative to what you're doing and why. If it's a problem that has been solved a thousand times over (http clients, log manager abstractions, etc), it's pretty low value to reinvent on company time. If it's your time though, do whatever the hell you want, exercise that right to self-determination.

Edit: I will say, the times I've used that statement, it's been to someone who was trying to invent a wheel with no understanding of the existing domain. The comment was less don't do it, than learn what has been done and how, and then consider improving it from a position of authority.

It's not as black and white as you're making it sound though.

If it's a flat tire, then yea you might wanna reinvent it. But if it's a brand new tire that works perfectly, then you shouldn't reinvent the wheel.

Also, what @SortOfTested said.

Simple: Life is strange
And sometimes we forget that we take everything far to serious.

The only thing you should RREEALLYY think twice about... three, four, five times... is writing security code, especially cryptography. If you think you need to implement your own version of Spring Security, you wanna be REAL careful. If you think you need to write your own implementation of AES, you probably should put down the crack pipe. But pretty much anything else? So long as you have a good reason for doing so, then yeah, have at it. If you're just doing it "because" though, well, that's probably not a good justification (this all assumes company time - on your own time, re-invent any old wheel you want!)

@heyheni
Did you pay Dontnod and SquareEnix a licensing fee for that first line?

@Stuxnet my problem is that, to use your analogy, all the wheels are made of too many materials for each single piece.

My wheel doesn't need to be made from a thousand different metals and rubbers when all i want is a simple wheel.