My project manager is always asking me to use routines already done by “the big ones”. And I’m always telling him that I can do the same but lighter, because those routines are usually heavy (in bytes) because they have to handle many people’s necessities.
And not only this current project manager is asking me this. It happens with all of them. and that’s why I’m thinking all the time to start my own projects, because I’m tired of dealing with this kind of stuff.
OK, but here’s also some thoughts I have for you to analyze why I’m saying that not for all the cases you have to go with something already done:
1) The most important: If others are doing our routines for our applications, then what do we developers are going to do? If we leave this happen, then clients will not longer hire us.
2) Let’s talk about Android Fragments. Are you sure you can’t do this by code? By your own? It’s lame if not. Do you really need to go up in your Android API version only to support Fragments? I did the basics of Fragments for my own projects and they work. And they are not as heavy as Google’s, of course. Because I did what I needed for my project and I can upgrade that routine as I need it.
3) Animated left menu: This nice effect that you find in Facebook’s mobile application and it comes as a Drawer component in Android… Really can’t do your own? You need to go to that API level to get this fancy menu? I did my own animated menu like this one in a couple of hours and works really well.
4) Bugs: Do you really think these routines have no bugs? You think (as a project manager) that because it’s Google code then has no bugs? So wrong! They are really buggy. So, instead of dealing with someone else’s bugs, I prefer to deal with my own!
5) About testing on different devices: Everything is very limited these days (I’m talking about how many devices your customers use) The World is using basically technology you can buy for testing. So, it’s not like the old days, where all the stuff to test it was too expensive.
Conclusion: Start coding and stop letting others do your job because if we continue this way we -developers- are going to have no job .
