Why bother?

One day I saw a job ad in one of the corridors of my college. They were looking for a programmer/analyst, and I sent my resume. They called me back that same afternoon and the next day I was having a job interview. Two days later was my first day at work. That's the story of my first job, pretty straightforward isn't it?

Of course, at the time I had no idea what it was like to be a programmer in real life. Sure, I had many projects during my years in college, but that does not even give you a glimpse of what a programmer does out in the wild, where the real programming is done. I had to learn it the hard way, and I'm glad I took that job. It was basically web development, and had plenty of time to get used to the programming language and get adapted to life after you get a job. No, this is not an easy career path. There's just too much to learn and so little time. Also, what you learn today is deprecated within months. But it's very rewarding, and I'm not talking just on the monetary side.

The thing is, I've been working on many projects by now, and at first, it was always like starting from scratch and build everything new, which isn't a problem when we're doing a small project/application, but when things are massive, you've got a problem if you are boxed with that strategy. After that, I started to write my own code classes and reusing them in new projects, which was a great step forward, saved me a lot of time. But then I got to the point when I just can't be linking several classes and reading my code to see if something is applicable or not in any new project... Something's gotta be done here.

It was then that I realized that I had reached a point where I could use my acknowledge to create something that would not only help me solve this problem, but also many more people in the same situation (even if they don't know that they have the same problem). It was then that this question invaded my mind... Why bother?, probably it will take most of my free time for a year or so, and in the end I don't even know if I will be able to finish it, or worse, find out in the middle of the process that I don't really need it, or it was the wrong solution for my problem.

I already started working on the architecture, but the question is in the air.

- reno812