Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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Depends... what's more important to you, having control of every little detail of how underlying plumbing works, or increased productivity and the opportunity to spend your (finite) time on things that add value?

I mean, think about it... you already don't really have "complete control." You (presumably) didn't code your own OS from scratch in machine language... so why not? Did you code your own web-server from scratch? Your own PHP runtime? IP stack? No?

Seriously, nobody does that stuff from scratch because it takes too much time and they'd rather focus on the value they're actually trying to create, as opposed to re-creating the wheel. That said, having the ability to go down to the lowest levels of the stack does have value... when you actually need to change something to achieve your goals. Take the guys who originally built Beowulf clusters... they actually did go in and hack on network drivers and IP stacks and what-not, because they had a unique need (low latency) that required it.

Anyway, I'd say apply this by analogy to what you're doing. Focus on adding value and avoid re-inventing the wheel, unless it's just a hobby project for learning / experimentation... but reserve the right to go as low level as you need, if and when you have an actual need.

the site is my baby, I want to make a job out of it.(building it from scratch made my skills increase 10 fold).

I suppose though, now that its been made, I do have a 'framework' to work with.

Do you want to make a job out of your site, or building a framework for your site? These are two different things, and spending time one one tends to prevent you from spending time on the other.

This answer is 100% correct. Think about it in cash terms. The amount of time you spend writing the framework is time (money) coming out of YOUR pocket. There is ZERO point in writing your own framework or starting from scratch these days .. stand on the shoulders of giants and reach higher!

by job i mean money maker...

That is true, probably build out the site and extend/fix the framework as necessary.

Isn't it the same thing though?

If you use somebody else's framework, they can extend and fix the framework so you don't have to.

And if that framework is open source, and somebody else isn't extending or fixing it for you, you can do it yourself. You can still hack on it, but you don't have to build it from the ground up.

I respect building something from scratch so you can learn from it (I once wrote my own OS), but that tends to be helpful only once. After you've learned from the experience, you tend to be better at judging what to tackle yourself, and what you can leave to other people.

i do use jquery for some of it, also got some methods from the internet to make some tasks easier. So its not totally from scratch.

I spent 4 months developing my idea into a working wesite from scratch. As soon as I got a positive response from my users and started to show some traction I learned codeigniter and re wrote the entire site using a framework. The site is now more stable, secure, and I can add new features in hours rather than days.

Learn a framework, you'll be happy you did.

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