[fidotron]

There's a meta-question which is "if you did should you have been doing what you were doing?"

The times in recent years where I have used such things have tended to be technically successful and commercially worthless, while the things that paid off had a tendency to be churning through piles of tedious and stupid.

[fatnoah]

There's a meta-question which is "if you did should you have been doing what you were doing?"

Also a great question. As a manager, my first question would be to ask why a library wasn't used for algorithm X.

In grad school, I wrote a complete implementation of Rijndael encryption for a crypto class, but I would never expect (or want) anyone to try to build that themselves for production software.

[giantg2]

"while the things that paid off had a tendency to be churning through piles of tedious and stupid."

People tend to hire others to do the stupid and tedious stuff. Hence most jobs are stupid or tedious. I know mine is.