Recently, I attended the Dogpatch Labs New York City meetup with my coworker Jamie Forrest.
There were some interesting presentations, and one that really stuck out to me was done by Hard Candy Shell. I thought that Kevin Kearney, the presenter, had one really great point that stuck out to me.
People often talk about making something innovative, engaging, or a million other possible words, but when it comes down to it, they really just want something cool. I realized how true that was in my own personal preferences. There are plenty of things that may be more useful, interesting, or hard to make, but we always come back to what’s cool.
And cool is different for everyone, but nonetheless, whenever you make something new, what you really want is to make something that is cool for whoever you’re making it for.
This is especially true for the Internet where there are plenty of not-so-useful websites or tools out there. But, they survive (or even thrive) because they are cool.
I spent some time initially setting up my personal blog using a custom CodeIgniter structure. It went well, but then, as things can do, I began to falter in terms of time to put into the project.
It got me thinking about the more general idea of building something in software versus using a pre-built solution. When do you go with one instead of the other? How is that decision made?
After thinking about it, it really comes down to two things:
- Does the pre-existing solution fit what you need?
- If not, can it be extended?
What I realized is that spending time on making my own custom software with all of the bells and whistles wasn’t proving my merit, it was getting in the way of me building other, more exiting things that hadn’t been done a million times over before.
It made me realize that, while every decision is different, in many cases it can be far better to take a pre-existing solution and extending it versus building your own from scratch. Sure, it’s not your code, but your overall productivity (the ultimate measure in many ways), can be greatly enhanced from it.
