I did a bit of wheel reinventing today, for one of my personal Canonical Black Holes Of Developer Time examples, too: I wrote a shopping cart.
I really, really did not want to do this -- that is why I've been using somebody else's shopping cart for the last two years. But there were two outstanding usage niggles with their cart, and my intuition from previous A/B testing is that these two niggles were going to cost me a few thousand dollars this year.
So I specced out a pretty minimal replacement -- take open source library A, write a very little connecting code, hook into shopping cart service backend B, get done in 2 hours. Of course it ended up taking 8.5, and I've still got one bug from myself, one bug Javascript bug in Firefox 3, and one apparent bug in either the shopping cart service or Google Checkout itself.
Bah.
But, on the plus side, the new cart looks great, provides for a much better user experience, and is bugs-in-your-teeth fast compared to the old one. After I get the code a little cleaner I'll write up the design rationale and how I went about building it -- maybe somebody can save themselves an hour or three that way. Because just because we have to reinvent the wheel doesn't mean we have to reinvent the spoke, too.
I really, really did not want to do this -- that is why I've been using somebody else's shopping cart for the last two years. But there were two outstanding usage niggles with their cart, and my intuition from previous A/B testing is that these two niggles were going to cost me a few thousand dollars this year.
So I specced out a pretty minimal replacement -- take open source library A, write a very little connecting code, hook into shopping cart service backend B, get done in 2 hours. Of course it ended up taking 8.5, and I've still got one bug from myself, one bug Javascript bug in Firefox 3, and one apparent bug in either the shopping cart service or Google Checkout itself.
Bah.
But, on the plus side, the new cart looks great, provides for a much better user experience, and is bugs-in-your-teeth fast compared to the old one. After I get the code a little cleaner I'll write up the design rationale and how I went about building it -- maybe somebody can save themselves an hour or three that way. Because just because we have to reinvent the wheel doesn't mean we have to reinvent the spoke, too.