[aristus]

I'm not a 10x coder, but over the years I've learned to deal with buggy 3PLs by avoiding them, or encapsulating them once and for all. The problem with buggy 3rd-party libs is that the bugs are random. They quite literally keep you dumb by forcing to you memorize random trivia instead of new concepts.

Rewriting the same functions yourself in a better and more efficient way teaches you a lot, especially about 1) how to spot good libraries, and 2) when not to write it yourself.

If you look at the code of really effective hackers, the one thing they have in common is how small the code is compared to what it does. Look at web.py, or bret taylor's datastore built on top of mysql: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql