How does the 10x coder overcome configuration headaches?
DanielBMarkham: Use 3rd party stuff cautiously. I think "never use 3rd party stuff" is a little extreme, but remember that when you pick up the tool, the tool picks you up too. (Sorry -- watched too much Yoda) That is, you may want the tool for 1 or 2 really cool things, but the tool may demand out of you a week of playing around, pain and suffering, and a dedication that your spouse doesn't get.One rule I use is that when I pick something up, I make sure that I can google help whenever I need it. If Joe-Bob's awesome language or widget set has only 47 people using it, and you have to put up with abuse on an IRC channel or buy 15 books just to get respect from the community -- forget it.Wise choice of tools also means your cognitive load decreases. You simply don't have to remember so much crap anymore. Problem remembering how to attach events to an element in Javascript? Ten seconds with Google and you've got your answer.  There's a certain tipping point that products reach. Be careful using stuff before acceptance grows to that point.That's _platform-ish_ stuff. Tools, widgets, languages and such. For whatever you're actually doing, consider rolling your own stuff. Most times you only need a small subset of functionality, and if you're a good coder it's as easy to write it as use somebody else's. Plus, you understand what's going on. Many times I've used stuff with open source code only to spend hours plugging through their code trying to figure out what the heck they were trying to do. That hurts. Don't do that if you can help it. Sure it's great to modify OSS, but it's probably just as easy to spend that time learning more about the technical problem domain.For instance, I'm playing around with the idea of writing another web app. I took a look at YUI -- I really like it. But at the end of the day, so far at least, it does a whole lot of stuff that I don't need, and payload size is important to me. So I'm just going to roll my own stuff. You're always weighing future hassle against productivity. Sometimes, like with learning functional programming or picking up COM or something, the rewards may be much greater than the hassle. But for most stuff, like version control, project planning, configuration, deployment, setup, etc -- you don't have the luxury of taking 3 days to figure some of these tools out. So don't.