I’m not one to dispense advice often, but having made the same mistake over and over again in my career, I feel like I have one good piece of advice to share.

Fermyon

Every line of code written is a line of code that needs to be supported. Coding should be approached as artisanship, avoiding the Not Invented Here Syndrome, reducing code complexity, and writing tests to minimize support needs in the future, while documenting and making code understandable for others.

It Took Me 20+ Years To Learn This Lesson About Dev

For me it was a very inspiring article to motivate to write better code and mainly code tests.

“And why your future you (and others) will thank you for the code you’re producing today” — YES! This is coming from someone who needs to face technical debt every day.😭

For some projects “Not Invented Here Syndrome” looks like “Not Our Coding Style Syndrome” and leads to very stupid things, like forking existing code of another team and changing “their” coding style to “own” (naming for files, functions, variables, how spaces are used, etc.) while that another team continues development of the original project with “their original” coding style, and now it is absolutely not possible to merge “their” important fixes from original project into a new project because of the mess in diff…
There is also a bad thing about fighting “Not Invented Here Syndrome”: Every line of code written IN A LIBRARY is a line of code that ALSO needs to be supported! People sometimes introduce huge dependencies “to save effort” and “to not reinvent the wheel” for some simple case, but actually meet consequences of huge complexity due to introduction of bloated libraries that are not maintained by anyone… (and even “simple” libraries sometimes lead to problems like “npm left-pad incident”…)