Yes, definitely do this. Don't let people try to convince you that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Typically they just have some wheel they've reinvented that they want you to use. Instead, you should implement as many things as you can to learn how they work, and then use this knowledge to select tools and avoid bullshit and marketing choices.

And who knows, maybe you'll do something better. That's progress.

Also check out gevent and eventlet to see the differences with those systems as well. I just submitted a patch to eventlet to give it better zeromq support.