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Comment by efaref | Hacker News Reader

What a fool. Only doing what is necessary rather than spending hours and hours reinventing pointless wheels or introducing pointless abstractions is one of the key techniques that 10x programmers use.

There are counterpoints to many of his arguments, too. For example, using existing software is good, unless that software is a bad fit. You can end up with a Rube-Goldberg-esque monstrosity, held together by duct-tape that is impossible to use ("enter your back-end SQL query here in this tiny little text box") or impossible to maintain.

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I completely agree. For each 'oh look I found a plugin/library that does that' you can end up with

+ something what you need-ish, PLUS crap you don't + a layer of glue code to your codebase that will be as hard or harder to maintain. + your famously fantastic imported code will have it's bugs, that will be hard to find (as it's not owned) + nobody will 'know/own' it, so any tweaks will be duct taped. + it will diverge upstream, will at some point your version become fallow, and you end up with 'code sclerosis': you can no longer extract the old and get a new, fresh version.

So yes, all that time and headache you will spend for your 'quick win' could have been spent solving the problem for YOUR use case by paying the price upfront and writing the code.

I've seen that so many times it's not even funny. There is also the manager's version of that, with the world famous "I found that library online, does JUST what we need and only costs $5k, and we even get SUPPORT!11!!"

This, so much this.

I would never want to work for a company who's business model is shoehorning random libs together into a frankenstein just to quickly get that client out the door and a new client in.

Wouldn't that be a little like a construction worker fashioning his own hammer, cutting his own boards, fabricating his own cinder blocks, etc?

Sure if you were rolling everything yourself. But you can still use pre-built solutions.

As a developer I use frameworks to aid in my building, like a construction worker uses premade hammers. But if a building needs a specific type of board, cutting our own wood is a viable option, or molding our own blocks.

The foundation is solid, but we build on top of it so our house is unique and to specifications, not just a cookie cutter run of the mill house that everyone else has.

Cool sarcastic comment. Maybe just leave that part out next time.

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