It is easy for creative thinkers to do things their own way. Especially when coding, if you build an infrastructure from the ground up, you know its every possible quirk. You do not have to consider anyone else’s mistakes or logical preferences (or illogical preferences, ahem – this makes more sense if you have worked with other people’s codebases).

Most of all, you gain satisfaction from solving a problem without requiring anyone’s help. Call it ego, if you will, but it feels amazing. The problem is, one must also rely on the current state of knowledge or technologies, and use to those too. If done right, you can use the best of both worlds: use existing tech to speed up a process, and then add in your own code to adapt the solution to your needs.

Use, Reuse, Recycle…

I recently wanted to add a contact form to a website, and I immediately started building it from scratch. Luckily, I came to my senses before doing it again. One: I already have similar code in other projects. Why should I code it from scratch once more? And two: Writing new code requires testing and optimizing it. Do I really need to do that for a simple form?

The answer is no.

I am sometimes guilty of not wanting to search through my old files or bookmarks, especially if they are in some old back-up drive that I no longer keep track of. It is sometimes easier to rewrite code (again and again) rather than organizing one’s own file system. But now that I think of it, keeping an organized life (and digital life) allows us to know how much to reuse and how much to create anew.

But the data’s clear on this one. Setting up a new infrastructure, maybe with new hosting or something like an AWS function, will take me several hours. If I have my old files handy, looking for a similar solution –either online or from projects I have worked on in the past– might take me fifteen minutes tops. And I can do that comfortably while indulging in some Cappuccino. Coding, on the other hand, requires so much concentration that one cannot enjoy one’s coffee – only the code matters.

Conclusions

Nowadays, there really is no excuse. Almost every simple project is solved somewhere on the Internet. Someone, somewhere, is likely to have written up a solution to a problem you have. And that’s great, too, because they have generally tested their code. Do you need to build something from scratch if it is already out there? Sometimes, standing on the shoulders of giants can be both useful and time-saving.

Note to self (because I know I’ll eventually need it): Don’t keep reinventing the wheel!