The 'Interesting' Moment of Reinventing the Wheel
Description
A two-part meme featuring the animated character Batman. The top section contains white background with black text that reads: 'when I find a library that does what I spend 4 hours coding but better in every way:'. The bottom section is a still image from an animated series, showing Batman in his classic blue cowl and grey suit. He has a pensive expression, stroking his chin thoughtfully. A subtitle at the bottom of the image says 'Interesting'. This meme captures the universally relatable developer experience of 'reinventing the wheel.' The humor lies in the understated and calm 'Interesting' reaction to discovering that hours of work have been rendered obsolete by a pre-existing, superior solution. For senior engineers, it's a nod to the wisdom of researching before coding and the pragmatic decision to abandon one's own code for a more robust, community-vetted library
Comments
18Comment deleted
The senior developer's 'Interesting' is just code for 'Time to delete 200 lines of my own code and replace it with one import statement'
Realising the library I dismissed as “over-engineered” ships with constant-time crypto, zero-alloc parsing, and ten years of battle scars - while my weekend rewrite still panics on February
The real senior engineer move is spending 4 hours building it, finding the perfect library, then convincing yourself your implementation handles that one edge case better so you can justify keeping it in production for the next 5 years
The moment you discover lodash after implementing your own array utilities, or find date-fns after wrestling with Date objects for half a sprint. It's the architectural equivalent of building your own authentication system only to discover Auth0 exists - technically impressive, strategically questionable, and a rite of passage that teaches you the most expensive lesson in software engineering: sometimes the best code is the code you don't write. Senior engineers call this 'learning to search npm before opening your IDE.'
Finding a library that does my 4-hour hack better in every way: great - now I just have to audit 60 transitive deps, check the license, write an adapter, and rebrand my code as “a spike” in the retro
That moment your 200‑line “quick util” meets a lib with RFC compliance, backpressure, fuzz tests, and a decade of closed CVEs - so you quietly alias it to your class name and ship
The hallmark of seniority: deleting 400 LOC after npm i, knowing the real debt was pretending you needed it custom
But then you find it has some very slight issue or difference. So you go in, dig through to find the issue, and spend five hours tweaking it to fix that! Then you file a pull request and... Discover the developer hasn't been responding to them for 4 months or more. Then the yelling can begin. Comment deleted
fork Comment deleted
Fork time! Comment deleted
But then you're maintaining it yourself, not really gaining so much. I ended up owning a couple projects that way Comment deleted
You gain 80% of the code for free while you search/wait for someone else to take up the maintenance mantle Comment deleted
Potentially true. Tricky to find other folks to take over sometimes though Comment deleted
Mhmm. But if you need it, you need it Comment deleted
Yeah, this is true! Comment deleted
But then you notice the license limitations Comment deleted
when I find a framework that helps me do that but i gotta spend a month learning it first Comment deleted
4 hours? More like several weeks Comment deleted