- horrible at negotiating and playing it safe
- biggest mistake was probably being afraid to read source code of third party libraries when the docs led me to a dead end. Always read the source
- stop trying to make everything DRY, duplication is better than obfuscation
As soon as I got over that and started inspecting the source of different projects I was using, I definitely became more confident in my own development skills by comparison, and I became instantly more valuable with the libs I was using because I had more control/understanding of what was actually happening behind the scenes.
I'm also mostly a .Net guy right now in a very .Net area, and they generally frown on that sort of thing until very recently. Not an excuse I know, but just for background.
I use them fairly often to parse things or make things more seamless, but is that the general way people go about solving problems? Is that wrong?
Implementing a OSS library yourself seems overkill, but at what point is it worth writing something yourself?
The main reason to write it yourself is if the libraries you find are crap, or you can't find any at all.