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Discussion on: What do you do if you're in the middle of a project and you realize it already exists in the world?

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Ben Halpern

That can be a tough road, as parity is usually a moving target

Yeah, it's more to give you an idea of where to start because innovation is kind of even a faster moving target.

Here's a pretty tangible example: I started by implementing a lot of Medium's features when first building DEV, gradually finding my own ways to do things differently and now we have a whole bunch of super awesome unique things but I didn't try to differentiate in any super meaningful way off the bat except a few basic things I thought were sort of table stakes (like syntax highlighting).

I'd repeat this pattern in the future. If you have an entirely novel idea, that's great, but if you want to create a useful tool in a known market, you don't need to do entirely new things. You can pick and choose from some cool existing ideas. As long as you understand why you're considering doing that and not cargo-culting off of existing implementations, borrowing the good stuff is a great path.