On experience
There have been many times in my life when I’ve been tempted to build from scratch. Especially in web based projects, I’m often told that no preexisting solution or framework will be able to help me to solve a given problem. I stopped taking that advice and learned a very long time ago that we have several beautiful and continuously improved interfaces for searching the depths of recorded history, that every problem I’ve encountered has likely been long solved by someone else, and that they more often than not have written about their experience, sometimes going as far as to document the solutions with illustrated steps. Building from scratch may do something for your ego, but does very little for your productivity. And I’ve yet to find someone who cares significantly about the extra work you did to get up to speed with a better solution that was already out there.
tags: history, google, originality, productivity, intentions, Inkscape, typography, type, words, 365, open source, creative commons
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