I have lost count of the times I have heard a developer exclaim ‘but I could write that in X days’ when discussing adopting an existing piece of technology developed somewhere else. This is usually given as a reason not to adopt an existing external solution but to instead write a custom solution with some minor improvement or feature. There are two big flaws in this line of reasoning.
The first is the assumption that you could create something with the same quality level as the existing solution in the stated number of days; most likely you will be lucky to have a functional prototype with minimal functionality. It is highly unlikely that you will have produced something that is as well tested, optimised and documented as the existing solution.
Secondly, as developers writing software which we intend to sell to users to pay the bills, we should be focused on the core features that define our product. It is these core features we should be pouring our energy and time into designing, building and testing. Developing alternatives to existing technology that is not in our core feature set is a waste of valuable time and energy and will not differentiate our product from that of our competitors.
We should instead be looking to leverage as many established technologies or components as possible when developing new systems as this lets us spend most of our time where it matters most on our core differentiating features.
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