Know when to not reinvent the wheel

1/16/2025

software

How easy it is to find an answer on google is roughly a function of how universal a question is

If you're trying to solve a problem and you have an intuition that you're far from the first person to encounter the problem, you can intuit how long (or not long) it should take you to find the answer on google.

Knowing a little bit about software gives you intuition about how hard something is to implement

Knowing how common your problem is gives you intuition on how diffused through society the answer should already be


The internet democratizes knowledge

Develop a sense for how democratized a given set of solutions should be given a problem

Tie to software engineering

Software works like legos

Pretty much all software is built off previous software

Then tomorrow's software gets built off that


Most of these legos are for problems that everyone has that they don't want to solve every single time for every time they do something new

In an internship the summer after my freshman year of college, I manually parsed a csv for a small script I wrote in java

  • This was at GE Aviation

  • This was when my only programming experience was from intro/OOP classes

  • This was before I had much experience with python or pandas

    • yes I'm sure java has a way to read in csvs as well and whatnot

I wrote a small script to automate an excel sheet and I hadn't really internalized the concept of libraries in programming, so I spent a whole afternoon manually writing logic to parse in the csv I'd be working with instead of doing a pandas.read_csv()


I did not know I didn't need to reinvent the wheel