Since many months, I am building back my very own base tools.
Alternatives to: grep, cat, apt, tail, head, cut, awk, sed, inotify, macro recorder, gif recorder, etc...
Yes, reinventing the wheel, my very own set of.
It appear to be an incredibly good experience.
Both of my tools performs over the originals, this wasn't my first goal!
Using them in other projects is amazingly faster than i can imagine.
Facing real cases, I modify them to perform better and better.
I can't advise it much than anything else.
This is exactly what an old mechanics do. His tools perfoms over anything you can gift him..
;)