Steps:

1. Have a great project idea and motivation
2. Decide that you’ll build it from the ground up, like a real torvalds-level dev
3. Loose motivation while building your low-level stuff and give up or waste your time maintaining that low-level stuff while not working on the actual project

What was the issue here?

I suppose it is pretty obvious that step 2 killed your great project. But if the problem is so obvious, why does it still happen all the time?¹

From what I observed, one or both of the following were the most frequent reasons:

The need to stand out

As software developers are often self-taught, they can develop a need to stand out compared to other developers. Even though I wish I could, I’ve got to say that I haven’t quite figured out yet why this is the case.

I can only say that this seems to occur pretty frequently among younger developers (mostly below 20).²

The need to have full control

Some people feel like they need to be in control over everything they develop, which often makes sense. You wouldn’t want a critical part of your software to do some ✨magic✨, like a black box where you can’t look inside. But often this security concern is taken too far.

Trust is an important thing that can help you lift a giant weight from your shoulders. Of course there can be an outage if you use an external service. But that risk compared to the overhead of a self-made solution is often a way better trade-off.

Is it totally wrong to build things from the ground up?

Of course not, It’s the opposite! I even advise you to do so. It’s always a great practice to build low-level things to know how they really work under the hood. But it should be in the right environment. Avoid mixing up multiple projects and getting yourself into too much overhead.

For example: I myself learned much during the development of compress.rs, a file compression tool. But when it comes to file compression in my projects, I rather rely on professional file-compressors, because then there’ll be one less thing I need to worry about.

My advice

Keep being curious about how things work and build them yourself, but don’t forget that you can stand on the shoulders of giants and enjoy reaching heights that would be impossible to reach on your own.