This is what most PHP developer do, most of the time. Most PHP devs don’t like to reuse, they think their case is unique, those who don’t… well, they don’t call themselves php developers, they call themselves drupal devs or wordpress devs or symfony devs or whatever cms/framework dev.
But the real (sarcasm) php dev will create an acl from scratch at every job he have. he will create countless media manager, db layer, session manager, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I think you can’t be a good php developer if you haven’t gone through this stage, but please, for the sake of your coworker sanity, keep you’re “learning process” outside of the workplace and don’t forget that you should stick to “learn-and-throw-away”.
Some bad reason to reinvent the wheel that I hear all the time:
Existing solution does not apply to us
Yeah right, you feel better when you think you are unique, good for you, but unfortunately it’s probably not true. I agree on one thing though, you’re different, everybody is different, that’s why the solution will need to be adapted, but surely not written from scratch.
It’s gonna be faster to create our own solution rather than adapting or learning something else
Yeah right, it’s gonna be faster for the guy doing it this time, but for everybody else trying to use/modify/understand it in the future it’s gonna be a pain in the ass because your solution will be half documented (probably not documented at all) and with no community support. By the time somebody needs help from the original developer, he will probably be working somewhere else, reinventing the wheel again…
There is nothing in the whole universe that remotely resemble what we’re trying to do
Yeah right, again, the “I’m unique” power trip. There’s billion of people on the planet, that have met and fixed billions and billions of problems, a lot of them have written about their solution in books, blogs, code, tweet….
