Comment by ayaros

Regarding a plan, I often feel the same way about my own project. There are a number of systems I've rewritten multiple times, and I can't help but think much of that would have been unnecessary if I had been more tedious about diagramming out my needs and requirements beforehand. Other times I wonder if I would have gotten this far had I planned things out... It's the age old question of "would I have started this project if I had known how much time and effort it would have taken?"

Each approach has a clear set of pros and cons, as others have explored in this thread. In the end, I think what ultimately matters is whether we're satisfied (and proud) of a project after a significant amount of progress has been made.

I also took the "I want to write everything myself" approach with my project since I wanted it to be a demonstration of my abilities. I wanted to prove to myself and others I could create a project of significant size and scope. It seems like this often means working without libraries and having to reinvent the wheel over and over again. It's tedious, but it certainly adds to the satisfaction you get as you look over your work and think "this is truly mine; I did this."

And yes, copy ideas, not code, is one of those things I do my best to adhere to. Sometimes, at least with JS, you run into problems, look into solutions, and it turns out there's really only one sensible way to do something; what you end up writing feels like a boilerplate solution to the problem. I often find myself going back and forth through search results from places like Stack Overflow and trying to siphon out the best techniques and ideas from multiple examples to mesh together into some usable code in a style I prefer.

Finally, since I failed to say this eariler, congrats on your project! I'm gonna have to try it out as soon as I get some extra time.