Here is a page from my personal diary(edited). So it's all about me basically and may get too boring due to technical details.
9th Feb 2020
I was working on a security and authorization module for a data api framework I built. I could have used a ready to use solution for that. But I am building one from scratch. I almost completed that when I got a chance to talk to a friend regarding some project opportunity and ended up explaining him what I built for the security and authorization module. It turned out that I had taken almost the same path which is used by Spring framework, one of the most popular framework in java. But my system is going to be a step ahead in what one can achieve using Spring. Though I could have read about it and then improvised upon it but I went for thinking it through from the scratch. He asked me why I am making it from scratch instead of using some solution. I realised that it is a very common question people ask me. Because I am almost always doing that. Reinventing the wheel. But the question is valid. Why?
Most often I try to justify by saying that I have a special need that cannot be fulfilled by the off the shelf solutions available in the market. Or try to justiify by saying the solutions are too generic and hence non efficient from a performance point of view. But the truth is, I just realised that, I love to reinvent the wheel. It gives me immense pleasure. I just love it. Building things from scratch. It gives me freedom to think out of the common framework.
WriterBabu is still quite fast in terms of page load time even though last code change I did for performance might be amost 7 years ago. When I now think about it, I built a social network which was again like reinventing the wheel when there was Facebook, and that too on core PHP, absolutely from scratch, no plugins, no framework. Javascript used was also using just jQuery and one plugin for text editor which was again cutomised from its source code. Don't remember any other pugin I used that way. For css even bootstrap was not used. And hence the effort it took to build it was about 10x more than if a framework(s) was used. And that too when I never had any plans to monetize WB from the start.
So again, why did/do I do it? The answer is simple and maybe crazy. Just for fun ... :D
Btw, it's time now to recreate WB. Maybe a much simpler version. It will take some time but it will be fun.
Image Credits:
Cover image - Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Image in end - Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash
