Who does find themselves sailing through the process of 'reinventing the wheel'?

Im not asking about anything specific, but the feelings and doubts whispering that probably you really are going down the rabbit whole by doing so, and so is your free time -or not so free-

The thing is, I don't know if really, really this kind of decisions are genuine when it comes for example to a whole new framework, editor or solution... Its case specific, but I have plenty of hard times to keep on due to family and friends not really understanding what I am doing, specially if its intended for developers to use, makes one feel its just thin air, and I have just me to hold into the strong reasons to do so.

Leave a comment if are also 'reinventing the wheel' in any way or want to share your opinion or story on the matter!

It depends a bit but generally "reinventing the wheel" is just as much as tailoring a solution which in some areas like electronic design just plainly unavoidable, save you're trying to do stuff like making your own mcu

Outside of my own personal projects... I try not to invent ANYTHING.

If the client, my PM, sales, and myself have done needs assessment, design, architecture, planned right I should be on a set of tasks that are already defined with a clear plan for how I'm going to accomplish them, with little more than turning pseudocode into actual code.

I mean, there's a little more to it than that, but it might be "Make an API with the following GET, PUT, DELETE operations". Point being I know EXACTLY how I'm going to do that.

Does it need to use OAuth, fine, I'll factor that in. Are there some stipulations from the app side for string or numeric values etc... fine, we'll put some sanitation on the parameter inputs... but I'm just going to... write a REST API. Same as the other 100 I've made.

Is it going to parse the JSON itself in some fancy super fast way?

No, it's going to query a DB and json_encode the return value with MAYBE some filtering.

Never reinvent the wheel, the wheel is good.

@HiFiWiFiSciFi Perhaps I should have noted that Im 'reinventing the wheel' with a personal project in my own free time, nothing related to my job.

All the times you may tell yourself "crap, the way I perform X task depends on a ton of dependencies" is when can come in play to experiment with your own solutions about that specific task. Most mainstream frameworks or libraries come with plenty of multi-purpose methods to fit a fat wide range of developers which doesn't even perform X task as polished as you'd desire.

I like reinventing the wheel. Even at work, but in that context only in cases where I can see it adding real value (and I’m not sure it’s exactly reinventing the wheel, but maybe starting from farther down the road than I would actually need to if I only wanted to get the job done?). But yes, on personal projects there really isn’t many better ways to learn something in enjoyable ways than (re)inventing (the wheel). Heck, I’m reinventing PHP at the moment!

@100110111 >I'm reinventing PHP at the moment

Is this some slang language of 'taking a dump'?

(jk)

@Jedidja in a way, maybe.