I think implementing patterns that are "solved" in SAAS or FOSS is a really awesome way to learn. I grow tired, however, of convincing teammates that no, I don't want to support their homegrown HTML templating library in production, having to worry about bugs or security vulnerabilities.
Editing to really affirm that I agree especially with personal projects. I have a lot of projects where pieces I want to build approximate some percentage of something like AWS Lambda, but I want to do a custom version because it's more fun and will make the project easier, since I'm not planning for anybody else to ever maintain it.
> I don't want to support their homegrown HTML templating library in production
On the flip side, that's how projects like Spring, Spark, jQuery, Angular, React, Kafka, Cassandra and Mongo came to be: somebody did something that somebody else was always doing, but a little bit better, and ended up making a career out of it.
Sure! And I think the degree to which you have the "room" to do that in your job depends on the company. I'm not here to spend my novelty budget on a routing framework that can't handle optional parameters.
Editing to really affirm that I agree especially with personal projects. I have a lot of projects where pieces I want to build approximate some percentage of something like AWS Lambda, but I want to do a custom version because it's more fun and will make the project easier, since I'm not planning for anybody else to ever maintain it.