Stop writing custom code.
We get it, you’re a great developer. Now stop writing your own version of every library under the sun.
In the last week of my systems programming class last year, my professor told us if there was one thing we needed to remember from the entire semester, it was that the biggest optimization you can make to a program is from broken to working.
Having spoken with fellow interns from a number of different startups here in San Francisco, the biggest complaint I hear is that we’re maintaing custom code for no good reason. Interns and new employees need to learn a codebase fairly quickly when they join a company, and they approach the code with a fresh set of eyes. The verdict is in, and those eyes are saying code is much more complicated than it needs to be.
Your engineering hubris and machismo cost everyone time and money. Your small optimization will never see the light of day because you never contribute your changes back to the community. Writing cool code in obscure languages or rewriting industry-accepted libraries is great as a hackathon project or when you’re at Facebook-scale, but it’s dumb and dangerous otherwise.
There’s a time and a place for innovative custom-written code that advances the edges of engineering and computer science. It’s almost certainly not appropriate at an early-stage company.