[pmontra]

RYO is the best way to learn, if you have the time to learn. After building one own solution one is able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of what other more experienced people built. Without the learning phase those other solutions are incomprehensible black boxes. The trick is not to skip the phase in which one researches available solutions.

[Someone]

> RYO is the best way to learn, if you have the time to learn

The problem is that nowadays, people roll their own solution, don’t take the time to learn (somewhat understandably, given the complexity of today’s stuff. You simply cannot learn all details about your hardware, OS, and third-party libraries anymore) but immediately deploy things in production.

Eating your own dog food can be good, but for security related stuff, it can easily be disastrous.

[brookst]

Honest question: is there anyone truly good at security who never made a potentially-disastrous dogfooding mistake while learning?

Not to decent mistakes or amateur brain surgery, but there has to be some level of risk tolerance among tinkerers.

[DrewADesign]

Developing software that has the sole purpose of preventing something dangerous from happening is exactly when people should strive to be engineers, not tinkerers. Beginners often don’t know the difference.

[DrewADesign]

Learning as you go is great if you’re not basing your core development workflow or data integrity on it.