Don't be afraid of reinventing the wheel for your own sake. Sure we end up with a lot of wheels, but then when some of those wheel makers come together, they can build something great.

Absolutely not!

I kind of dislike this reinventing the wheel metaphor..

You are not trying to invent something new, you are just practicing and are trying to grasp the inner workings of a concept to THEN invent something to improve the "wheel".
According to this metaphor, every english student is reinventing English when he is writing his own essay...

This doesn't really make sense...

And don't be afraid to write yet another Javascript framework. But fearlessness aside, just refrain from it and learn something useful instead. Time is too precious to build stacks of unused frameworks and wheels.

Sometimes you really do need to reinvent the wheel, and sometimes fancier rims will do.

I agree with a lot of the sentiments around "this is why the JavaScript community is so riddled with useless libraries". That's a problem. But if no one decided to try and reinvent the wheel, we'd all still be using jQuery. I learned way more JavaScript trying to reproduce what others had done (then throwing it away) than I ever would have if I had just followed the sheeple who just do what everyone else is doing.

@tytho well, trying to clone something and throw that away is a good way to learn. The dumb thing is creating a "module" that already exists, and putting it for other devs to use, instead of just contributing to an existing project and improving it.

@darddan
Yes

@darddan for sure... I hate this about the JavaScript community, npm in particular. Full disclosure, I used to do this, but about 2 years ago, I went and unpublished a bunch of my modules because no one was using them or there were better alternatives.

I wish that npm would sponsor an npm cleanup day, and just go through and review a lot of stupid npm modules as a community. I'm sure feelings would be hurt, but so what. You built your stupid package, you learned a lot, but no one has downloaded your package for 3 years, it's doesn't even work on current versions of node, and there's another package that has a community around it. Join the community! Don't passive-aggressively publish your version because you think you're hot stuff. You'll be much more hirable if you contribute to the community rather than just just going solo.

Sorry, had to dig those feelings up