[matheusmoreira]

> Off the shelf ones can be cumbersome and not work quite how I want them to.

Yeah, that's exactly why I reinvent wheels!

I ended up forking an existing templating language and customizing it into a static site generator. I'm not sure what's more difficult: changing other people's code or doing it from scratch.

[ozim]

You forgot 3rd option maybe hardest - just using other people code and understanding it instead of misusing it, calling it crap and going to write ones own broken thing. ;)

[matheusmoreira]

I don't think I ever called anyone else's work "crap" though. The software I forked is the pug templating language. It's unmaintained, looks like the author has moved on. Most of my work involved deleting the features I didn't need so that it would be easier to understand and work with. It had a Javascript parser inside it.

But yeah, I get what you mean. It's definitely the hardest thing to do.