Ask HN: How much of your product/project is your own code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131646

by ktrgardiner • 14 years ago

4 3 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With all the wonderful apps and services out there that have been made or are in the works, it'd be interesting to know how much was built by hand and how much was built on pre-existing code. Did you build it from the ground up or use other services? While the use of other services will most likely be the case for things such as digital delivery and payment processing (be sure to include those though), perhaps there will be a few surprises.

bmelton• 14 years ago

Depends on the project. My usual go-to is Django, so relatively speaking, while I might have 'written' the authentication model, it depends on thousands of lines of code that the wonderful Django devs already wrote for me.

The right answer to this question, for me at least, is "as little as I can get away with". Sometimes you end up with a bit of technical debt, as a lot of libraries don't quite work how you want or expect, so you end up either forking or rewriting those after launch, but I'm a firm believer in just 'getting to launch' as quickly as possible, and you don't get there by writing your own ORM, caching mechanism, etc.

Sorry to give what has to be a very non-surprising answer.

semicolondev• 14 years ago

For a fairly quickly implementable web product logic (include basic auth, profiles, blogs, dynamic pages - they don't count to main logic, however are necessary), I usually end up writing ~40% of the code, remaining is code-reuse or available in choice of development framework or at some corner of github.

coreygoodie• 14 years ago

Do searches on github count?

Ask HN: How much of your product/project is your own code?

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