About great bikes, or why sometimes you need to write from scratch

Not invented here - a source of innovation and a reason for success?

I cannot give you a recipe for success, but I can give a recipe for failure exactly: every day and every minute, do everything the way others do.
Unknown author.

Very often, companies are against the syndrome of "not invented here" . I, as a project manager, perfectly understand such considerations. Bicycles are extra costs, lengthening the development time, the complexity and high cost of product support in the future, dependence on the developers of the bicycle and all that jazz.

But as a programmer, I understand unequivocally - without bicycles there will be no innovation. And without innovation there will be no breakthrough technological solutions, new projects. There will be only the same, similar to each other, projects and applications collected from one set of cubes, which can not compete with each other (unless someone sues and “wins out” the market).
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It’s not by chance that Google allocates 20% for free creativity, and this gives rise to such magnificent rethinking of old things as the Gmail mail client.

But about everything in order. In this article I want to briefly describe the three "bikes" that revolutionized their field.


Bicycles and innovations often go side by side - sometimes literally

Ford Model T

If I listened to my clients, I would have to give them a faster horse.
Henry Ford, a distinguished entrepreneur and inventor.

At the beginning of the 20th century, automobile production was manual. Each operation was performed individually. Also, the cars were very expensive, because there were a lot of different settings in the “config” of the assembly, and this led to costs.

Ford changed the situation radically, going against the prevailing ideas, and invented the bicycle. First, he threw away all the additional options, saying the famous phrase “any client can get a car painted in the color that he wants - as long as that color is black.”

But more importantly, he first patented and began to use an industrial conveyor for assembly, increasing production efficiency hundreds of times. What is told in the famous book "" My life, my achievements ".".

Ford's ingenuity has made the automobile of luxury an ordinary, affordable vehicle for the American middle class.

However, not all attempts are successful and can just go, not to mention the take-off.

Google

Google is an example of a fantastically successful corporation combining the innovativeness of its products with commercial success.

However, in the early 2000s, when they were just starting out, the situation on the search engine market was completely different. Today, Google is the leader and monopoly. And then Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, Lycos and a number of other search engines reigned, which now only Internet bison remember (I would like to say that only Fido was older than that, but that would be a lie)

It would seem that it is worthwhile to reinvent the wheel when there are so many successful corporations on the market. However, Sergey Brin did not think so; on the contrary, he was actively interested in the subject matter, first making it the object of his research. And then, together with his future partner, Larry Page, he wrote a prototype of the search system within the university, from which the super successful company then survived, which survived the collapse of the dot-com and defeated all its competitors.

Google scored and recruited only the best, and supports the spirit of enthusiasm and creativity, which is incompatible with the ban on the creation of their bikes. 20% of the time allocated to employees to create their projects, and this has borne fruit several times.

nginx

In the fall of 2001, I had the idea to write a lighter and more productive web server than Apache. At that time there were already other similar servers, but they all could not proxy, they gave only static. They had one more common flaw - they worked in one process, and, accordingly, it was unrealistic to scale them, say, on a two-processor machine.
At that time, I already had quite a good experience working with Apache - both as a system administrator and as a programmer. Two modules I wrote added knowledge: I had to look at the source code for Apache and understand how it all works. Therefore, many things in nginx migrated from Apache ideologically. Not code, but ideology, all nginx code was written from scratch.
From an interview with outstanding developer Igor Sysoev

There were no other variations of the web server on Habré - both in PHP, and in bash, and almost in Brainfuck (hmm, but maybe not? Need to be checked! :)).

But the really serious development is extremely small. Indeed, in the field of web servers, it would seem, everything has been decided long ago - there is Apache checked over the years, there are all sorts of Tomkats for Java, for MS there is an IIS, in general, choose - I don’t want. And undertaking to develop a web server, which in the future will not only bypass apache, but even in places displace it (many put nginx + php-fpm without Apache) - this is not just bold, it's just unheard of!

But, nevertheless, the bike was written, and achieved impressive results ( 100 thousand connections, Frya, nginx, oil, 2007 ).


Words outstanding innovator relevant today.

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Why all these stories? It may seem to you that writing a bicycle is unnecessary.
The authorities can successfully brainwash that it is not necessary to write your components, you need to take everything ready.
Friends say that 10 frameworks (servers, encoders, search engines, archivers, rovers, etc.) are already written, and that your idea does not make sense.

This all makes no difference if you are truly an Inventor. Not necessarily every day, but once a week, devote creativity. Let it be a day off, or an evening of every day.

Find what you like. And create something new and new that can be shown to the world. After all, if everyone will collect products from Lego cubes and copy each other, who will move the world, if not the inventors of bicycles?

Invent it all again!

upd: in the comments I saw complaints about the lack of a definition of “bicycle”. The general definition of unambiguous, as is known, does not exist. Give me my

So - under the bicycle, in the article I mean writing my own solution from scratch for a certain range of tasks, when there are already ready-made alien solutions that these tasks have solved. And I don’t make any connections with quality - a bicycle can be both super-successful and simply want to cry while looking at it (the second one is more).

There is no doubt that nginx is a bicycle in this sense, no - this is a web server, albeit different in architecture and containing new ideas. But __were __ the web server, and yet Sysoyev wrote nginx from scratch, for which he thanks a lot and thanks a lot. And the search engines were already up to Google, and the cars were also made before Ford.