I can't believe this is such a controversial take. Solving hard things by yourself is growth. I 100% agree, rather solve a hard solved problem yourself than learning yet another JS framework or launching yet another revenue losing SaaS ("successful" because of VC). Or whatever. Push hard boundaries.

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stouset 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nobody is really saying not to build these things. They’re saying the problem is exceedingly annoying to solve—and often not in a technically interesting way but in a way that is just massively tedious—and a better alternative almost certainly already exists.

If you want to build it to scratch an itch, go ahead. If you want to build it for fun, go ahead. If you want to build it because an existing solution gets something wrong and you can do better, go ahead (but know that it is a way bigger undertaking than you might assume at first glance).

The real advice is “don’t casually build your own X”, but that’s less punchy.

	▲	immibis 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		An exemplary one is "don't build your own timezone database" It's not interesting, it's not fun, it's just a process of getting complaints it's wrong in edge cases and then fixing them, over and over until no one can find another broken edge case. You can start by writing down England is +0, Germany is +2, etc... someone's going to mention DST and you'll put in a field for switching on the Nth Sunday of month X... later you'll run into a country that uses a different rule and you'll add a bunch of spaghetti code or write a Turing-complete DSL, etc... One day someone tells you about a village where they count 17 hour days on seashells and then you'll give up. And if your DB doesn't produce identical results to the Olson DB in all cases then you created an incompatibility anyway. Might as well just use the Olson DB.
	▲	thfuran 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>If you want to build it because an existing solution gets something wrong and you can do better, go ahead But please at least file the bug first.

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myaccountonhn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it's a spectrum and most fall somewhere on the line, hopefully dependent on the project.

My personal limit is rolling my own crypto, but I'm definitely more on the DIY scale because I agree. It's a fantastic way to grow and learn, and it's likely you might not have the energy to do it outside of work.

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brianpan 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's controversial because 1) good on someone for wanting to do something difficult and 2) I cannot think of a worse thing to try to implement. Maybe trying to parse the world's postal and street addresses is a close second?

Just, why.