Jeff Atwood, An American software developer, author, blogger, entrepreneur & co-founder of Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) once said & I quote “The best code is no code at all. Every new line of code you willingly bring into the world is code that has to be debugged, code that has to be read and understood, code that has to be supported. Every time you write new code, you should do so reluctantly, under duress, because you completely exhausted all your other options.”

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Famous Computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said, “If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent’.” Code is an expenditure. It’s a cost in terms of the time taken to write, test, deploy, and maintain, but also a cost in terms of the mind space it occupies in engineers’ brains — or the time it takes to understand it later after its writers have moved on.

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First of all, let me start by saying we don’t hate coding, on the contrary, we simply love it. Afterall it’s our bread and butter. What we discourage is unwarranted spent (of human effort, time, and money) on replicating things. Wheel has already been invented, go, and build better cars using them.

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We can surely say the same when it comes to building custom business applications (solutions). Unless and until a comprehensive analysis tells you to do so, using an open-source platform for your custom business solution should always be your last option.