I Should Have Coded it Myself
This week has been kind of frustrating from a developers point of view. I am working on a project that has three completely different sections of a website, each with their own permissions and functionalilty. With so much involved in these systems, I thought it would be a good idea to use pre-built software packages and edit them to fit what I am trying to accomplish. That is where the trouble has started.
While setting these systems up on testing server I started to hit more snags than I had anticipated. As the hours pass and I am still fighting with configuration details, I am really wishing I was in the coding phase, I have already modeled everything in UML and I am ready to rock. But unfortunately, I am still messing around with getting Zend Optimizer installed because one of the systems seems to think encoding their code is a good idea.
So here I am pulling my hair out, accessing the server every way known to man, and thinking “What a minute, why didn’t I just write this app myself?”. I originally decided not to code the entire thing because of the time and complexity involved, but that is really a non issue with all the open source frameworks available. When I start looking at the systems I am using, that’s all they really did. Just used a framework, built a system, and placed a price tag on it.
I am thinking on any future projects, I will be coding the app in Zend, Cake, Ruby on Rails, whatever fits the solution best.
How do you decide when to code and when to use pre-built solutions?
