One aspect of growing in a career in development is knowing when to write your own code and when to use the work of others.

So many libraries available via others work.

This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but when we start out it’s like we want to roll everything on our own. I don’t know if it’s because we want to prove to our employer, our clients, or ourselves we can do it. Maybe it’s a mix of the two or maybe we just welcome the challenge.

Maybe it’s all the above.

Whatever the case, we’ll eventually work on larger projects and eventually become more specialized. That is, we’ll identify what we need to write and where we can use an existing library.

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A few weeks ago, I shared a post in which I walked readers through how to achieve something within the context of WordPress. It essence, it was programming advice.

The post was received okay, though it wasn’t without its [valid] set of criticism (which I’ll address later). Luckily, most of the people who responded did so via comments and emails explaining why they took issue with part of the code, and how they would go about addressing it were they having to solve a similar problem.

Not everyone was like that (and they never are). Instead, if you share any code of any type in any fashion with anyone you’re likely to get some type of response reading something like

It’s okay, but it’s not how I would do it.

The problem with statements like this – especially for those who want to get better at what they’re doing – is it implies there’s a better way, but the way isn’t offered up as a solution.

Bummer.

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It’s one of those nights where I’m sitting at my desk after spending the majority of the day at the computer. This used to be the norm when I was younger, but now I try to keep my hours at my desk a bit more limited for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes, as we all know, work ends up keeping us up a little bit later and in places a little bit longer than we’ve anticipated.

In this instance, I’m working to track down a bug I’ve been after for a better half of the day and it’s something I need to get done now because later will be too late.

There’s other work to do and this is something that needs to be shipped, anyway.

If you’re someone who writes any type of code for a living, then you know the feeling of programming frustration I’m talking about: It starts off at a level of looking forward to getting back into the code with a level of confidence thinking:

“Okay, I’ve had time to step away from it. I should be able to come at this with a fresh perspective.”

Because sometimes that’s exactly what happens isn’t it?

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