I have seen developers build a lot of unnecessary and counterproductive pieces of software over the years. Generally, developers at small to midsize SaaS companies shouldn’t build any software that doesn’t directly help them deliver a service to their customers.
Whether it was the zero interest rate period, bad management, or hubris, developers spent a lot of company money on projects that never made sense given their employer’s goals and size. I have seen custom implementations of every type of software on this list. None of it worked better than open source, and none offered a competitive advantage.
If you find yourself developing or managing any of these twenty types of projects, stop and seriously consider what you are doing.
- Scripting languages
- Compiler extensions
- Transpilers
- Database extensions
- Databases
- DSLs
- ORMs
- Queues
- Background work schedulers
- GraphQL
- Stateful REST
- Frontend Frameworks
- Backend Frameworks
- Servers
- Dependency Injectors
- CSV writers or parsers
- Cryptography Implementations
- Logging Libraries
- DateTime libraries
- Anything from “First principles”
There are always exceptions, if building this software has some competitive advantage, go ahead. In general, anyone suggesting these projects is biting off more than they can chew and doesn’t fully understand the problem they are trying to solve.
Most often things start out as a quick hack – “I’ll just concatenate these strings with a comma, it will be faster than finding a full CSV library.” Soon you’re implementing custom separators and string escaping.
If your company has done their own implementations don’t despair, iterate towards a better library!