A couple years ago I wrote a small post called “starting things is cool”. This is the longer answer to why I keep building those things myself, even when easier options are right there.
There's power in learning how to build something yourself. In particular today where things change weekly. If you don't have a frame of reference is hard to discern what's real and what's smoke and mirrors. Keep building!
When I started coding I had to learn React to be able to build my product. Then I learned about deployments and hosting and cloud computing. But above the techincal stuff, I learned how to think better.
That's why I strongly believe the best thing about building tools yourself is that you end up learning A TON of things. Which is in itself extremely valuable.
It's a good thing to build everything yourself. Real understanding comes from building things. During university I learned to write HTML and CSS sign by sign. In my first job we received a graphic design and then I built the website by hand pixel by pixel. Same with Java. I learned to write it line by line, function by function. Same with SQL. Same with XML. Same with Entity-Relationship-Modelling. And so on and so on. There have been already tools around back then to simplify the building process. But we considered them as not cool 😅
All the basics that I learned help me now to understand problems in a very short time, to find the root causes and to solve them.
During all the projects that I have been involved in my career, the most valuable persons have always been those who understand complex problems. Who have the skills to break down the problem into smaller chunks and then find the root cause.
You need many years of practice in that.
Imagine nobody in the world would anymore understand how a car is built and how to repair it.
Always look at automotive. Not everyone in the tech industry is really skilled to talk about tech. But building a car requires engineering skills ha ha 😆
So in case you are not sure, ask an automotive engineer what he would do.
There's power in learning how to build something yourself. In particular today where things change weekly. If you don't have a frame of reference is hard to discern what's real and what's smoke and mirrors. Keep building!
When I started coding I had to learn React to be able to build my product. Then I learned about deployments and hosting and cloud computing. But above the techincal stuff, I learned how to think better.
That's why I strongly believe the best thing about building tools yourself is that you end up learning A TON of things. Which is in itself extremely valuable.
It's a good thing to build everything yourself. Real understanding comes from building things. During university I learned to write HTML and CSS sign by sign. In my first job we received a graphic design and then I built the website by hand pixel by pixel. Same with Java. I learned to write it line by line, function by function. Same with SQL. Same with XML. Same with Entity-Relationship-Modelling. And so on and so on. There have been already tools around back then to simplify the building process. But we considered them as not cool 😅
All the basics that I learned help me now to understand problems in a very short time, to find the root causes and to solve them.
During all the projects that I have been involved in my career, the most valuable persons have always been those who understand complex problems. Who have the skills to break down the problem into smaller chunks and then find the root cause.
You need many years of practice in that.
Imagine nobody in the world would anymore understand how a car is built and how to repair it.
Always look at automotive. Not everyone in the tech industry is really skilled to talk about tech. But building a car requires engineering skills ha ha 😆
So in case you are not sure, ask an automotive engineer what he would do.
Also, you may not want to be a prisoner in someone else's solution.
https://themaverickmapmaker.substack.com/p/building-versus-buying-ai-agents