When I was 27 years old and working at my first tech job, a mentor sat me down to teach me the most important lesson in software.

I was a fresh techie trying to up my game in software development and needed new solutions every other time I faced an issue, driven by the same passion. However, similar to what most beginners (fingers crossed) have experienced—I made a ton of mistakes: reinventing the wheel with pre-solved problems; shying away from existing libraries and massively underestimating the importance of community knowledge.

Then one day, my mentor told me—

"Good devs borrow, great devs steal; stop reinventing the wheel."
It was the day my life changed forever.

The abundance of open-source projects, frameworks, and pre-built modules that I dived into. I integrated them into my work, which helped me to save a great amount of time, too, besides improving the reliability and scalability of the applications. This approach enabled me to work on its innovation where it truly mattered, extending my capabilities and career.