Every Developer's Right of Passage
Why building is the best way to learn.
Like many of us, I started my development journey in a time before tools like React & Bootstrap were mainstream.
JQuery was a huge force in the ecosystem, and I was authoring CSS on a per-User-Agent basis thanks to the browser wars
(a period of time when none of the major browsers could seem to reconcile some form of parity with CSS or JS).
Fast forward a decade, I had learned how to build full stack applications with confidence and had pretty good amount of professional experience under my belt. But I'd mostly stayed in the realm of 'putting things together' - that is, being a consumer of packages & tools and building things around them. I don't think this situation ever really changes, depending on your perspective, unless you're willing to build your own OS & supported ecosystem from scratch. Shout-out to Andreas Kling!
That being said - I've witnessed countless instances of malware-pushing supply chain attacks and open source tools being deprecated or becoming pay-walled (Redis, for example). I think it has become the norm to expect the worst from any software ecosystem, so, except to meet the needs of an employer, why should I partake?
This brings me to the present day. I've got my own collection of very capable open source libraries/tools that I maintain. None popular, but my own - and I understand them at their very core. And through building them, I've experienced first-hand what lead the authors of the things I replace to make the decisions they did.
Somehow, building my own things has helped me to better understand and use the things I aimed to replace.
How about that.