I have hired many programmers, and I have been hired for many freelance programming jobs, and in all of them, I find people trying to work in a way to develop their own code. They feel like it would take too much effort to change an open source application to suit their needs, or that there isn’t an open source piece of software in the market that will do what they want, and usually they are wrong.

If you or a client need to run a content management system, then you are in luck as the market is full of well developed, highly featured CMS’s. You can have your choice of WordPress, Drupal, Joopla, Movable Type and more. Their is almost no reason today why a programmer would have to start from scratch in creating a content management system.

Even if you don’t want to use full open source applications, there are many people that release GPL code into the world that will quickly provide the functionality you need to get your custom application up and running.

The best thing that a coder can do is take stock of the features they would need, and then compare them to the base features of well produced open source software. If something fits ninety-percent of the way, then see if it is possible to expand it that last ten percent. Sometimes in doing so, you might add a feature that the market wants, and end up with a resell ready package.

Other times, you might not find something that easily fits into what you need to create, but if you list out the features you want to create, then you can quickly find the necessary code developed by others, cutting development time down by a fair bit if they have even slightly similar coding standards as you.

If you take the time to re-invent the wheel over and over, you are wasting time, making yourself look bad, and in the end, you’ll end up more frustrated than otherwise need be.

I’ve used WordPress for so many projects, and I have been able to quickly manipulate it in special ways to make it into a job board, design gallery, online magazine and more.

I’ve also been able to work with many free online scripts to build up projects that would have normally taken me months to develop in a matter of weeks. Finding code that other people have already created, especially code to interface with the increasing number of API’s in the market place.

On the other hand, if you build everything yourself and you are charging per hour rates, then you’ll definitely make more money than using any open source software or code.