[riprowan]

Everything you build becomes your code library that you carry forward.

Smart devs know this and cultivate their personal repetoire.

For example in the veeeery first days of .NET I had the opportunity to build a nice internal application for a client. Of course I didn't have a .NET library - the tech was just coming out of beta - but Microsoft was nice enough to provide a bunch of "example code" and "starter sites" to give all us noobs some patterns we could work from - at least most of the skeleton of a working, database back-ended website with a working security model.

From this .NET project it was easy to find another, and now I had a complete .NET library with solutions to all kinds of problems - how to do doc management, how to solve image resizing problems in .NET, how to talk to all kinds of heterogeneous systems using .NET, how to implement webservices, etc. because I'd built these once. With that toolbox I could easily solve all kinds of other problems with only a little creative remodelling of the skeleton app.

Then in 2007 when I jumped into OSS I got to start an all-new library building solutions on the LAMP stack. By 2009 I had a nice little library built up again.

The pattern is amenable to any software tech. Every project builds from the last one, if you do it right.