Many times, building out the features on a Drupal site seems easier with contributed modules. Why reinvent the wheel? Next thing you know, you're standing on your head trying to read module code backwards to understand it. Hours in you're making custom tweaks to keep your client happy and spending more time tweaking and overriding behavior than if you had just written the code for the feature from scratch.

Shortly after Drupalcon Portland wrapped up, I came across an excellent blog post by Mike Crittenden: Drupal and "Invented here". If you haven't read it yet, I'd highly recommend checking it out. Not only is it funny and entertaining, it is also quite informative and describes very well the dilemma presented to Drupal developers of using contributed modules versus writing custom code.

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