Should I use a web framework? Or should I build my own?

Valerio Barbera

Choose the web framework to build your SaaS product isn’t an easy step. As an engineer I know the risks to make a wrong technical decision, but I should be just as careful not to sabotage myself.

I want to talk about the consequences you go to reinventing the wheel within your own SaaS business by building things that other developers have created before you, often much better and more reliable.

Inspector was launched in the late 2019 as a new way for developers to monitor their business-critical applications saving a huge amount of time to identify issues and deliver improvements.

The key concept is “a new way“, because a brand new product shoud consist of things that you had to build because that’s why you started your business, to begin with: no one had solved this particular problem in this specific way before.

Bias

At the beginning of my career I thought that not relying on a web framework was a long-term advantage.

As product owner instead this mindset has suddenly changed becoming a “bias”.

Often, we shy away from paying $10 for a solution that costs us months of our time to build and more time every week to keep things go.

Questions like this continue to appear on social media:

post web framework bias

Why do we have to make yet another set of authentication views and password reset routines? Isn’t this a solved problem?

We keep walking on the edge of this ravine for two reasons I thought:

  • We want to save money at all costs;
  • We don’t trust other people’s work.

The myth of saving money

The financial reason is quickly debunked because even thinking about an hardcoded solution for a few hours is more expensive than just paying for a specialized product for a few months.

I would be careful to have a clear understanding of the effort that will be needed in the future for maintain every thing developed internally.

People works means money, probabily a lot of money draining away precious time that should be spent to make your customers happy and grow the business.

We don’t trust other people’s work

Every time I’ve trusted people in the past I’ve been let down, so now it’s easier and less painful to just rely on myself.

Maybe you feel similarly, and even if you don’t, you’ve probably experienced broken trust in a past relationship that has caused you to question whether or not it’s worth trusting again.

When you find yourself struggling to decide whether or not to trust a web framework, it’s important to figure out the reasons why.

Trust is as vital to healthy business partnerships as oxygen is to a scuba diver; survival is impossible without it.

Don’t fall into that trap. Experts in their fields have built the existing services. Unless you want to develop a competing product, they will always produce better things faster than you ever could. After all, they focus solely on the issue that is is just one of the things you need to solve your customers’ problems.

Don’t waste your time and money. Delegate time consuming tasks to autonomus tools that works for you 24/7.

Try Inspector for free as you long as you want

As a busy developer, the time and money it saves you when it comes to monitoring and error detection is worth 10x more than the monthly subscription!

Inspector is usable by any IT leader who doesn’t need anything complicated. If you want good automation, deep insights, and the ability to forward alerts and notifications into your messaging environment try Inspector for free.

Or learn more on the website: https://inspector.dev

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