The Pride of DIY

As mentioned previously, one of my hobbies is powerlifting. I have worked out of gyms, but have spent the last two years working out of a home gym. I made the decision back in 2020 in order to support my own laziness (I didn’t want to go to a gym after returning from work) but it felt prescient in 2021.

One thing that I’ve lacked is a proper space for powerlifting. I have a power rack, which demarks a space for lifting. What that rack is, there is where the powerlifting happens. However, it was just sitting in the garage. It was fine, but it lacked a sense of permance. It was just there.

The other issue that I was facing was that I was becoming concerned with the weight that I was using. I didn’t want to drop a weight and crack the concrete floor. I was also feeling a littled rattled when setting down heavy deadlifts. Concrete isn’t a forgiving surface, after all.

As such, I decided to build my own powerlifting platform. I watched some [YouTube videos][thralls] and decided it was something that was well within my meager woodworking skills. I’ll leave some photos of my progress, but I won’t bother leaving the steps. You can find better info online or read the guide that I used if you’re curious.

Happy with the results

Equivalent commercial platforms are quite costly in comparison. Often, the base cost doesn’t include the flooring or requires additional expenditure. While I’m happy to save some money (mine came in quite cheap in comparison), my bigger pride is with having built it myself.

There’s a certain pride that comes from building something for yourself. It never quite goes away. Every time that I walk up to the platform, I know that I’m stepping on something that I built with my own hands. My garage now has a pleasing wood smell. I also have a more permanent space for my hobby.

In the end, building was much better than buying. I wouldn’t have the pride of ownership merely from buying one. A commercial one might look nicer, but my relationship with it would be very different. This is mine.

Know when to build and when to buy

Building something usually takes time. Buying is often a better option, especially if what you’re buying requires expertise or comes at a high time cost. In the case of my powerlifting platform, neither was required. It made sense to put in the time and energy to build it.

For today’s software developers, there is an almost “never build” attitude. Anything that can be built will be. There are even those that argue that you should only ever build what cannot be bought. Otherwise, you should always buy your software. In most cases, this means outsourcing a lot of the moving parts of your software to third party libraries.

In many cases, this results in brittle software, vulnerability to all kinds of security vulnerabilities that originate elsewhere, and a significant waste of system resources from unused corners of these libraries. I’ve seen a lot of software that takes in a large dependency but only uses a portion of it. I’ve also worked on teams that found significant increases in performance metrics when we rewrote some items that met our requirements rather than stretch the code to meet the library’s expectations.

I’m not saying that one should never take third party dependencies. Indeed, they are great ways to rapidly start a project. However, the knee-jerk approach to check NPM for a package rather than research a domain space can lead to a culture of non-ownership. The ultimate software is just a series of transformations between libraries rather than a considered and well-designed codebase.

Not every part of a codebase will be as fulfilling as I feel about my lifting platform, but I love it in its imperfection. I’ve worked in a lot of imperfect codebases that I loved. Part of that love was because of how much of the code was “mine” (or my team’s). I’ve also worked in a lot of “clean” codebases were uninteresting because everything was delegated to another library. I’ve worked in codebases where the profiler highlighted third party libraries consistently.

These aren’t bad things in an of themselves. The software existed and provided value. But there was a significant morale deficit among the staff that worked on them. You can build a lot of pride of ownership by choosing what parts to build and what parts to buy. With this in mind, you can make deliberate choices that allow your staff to buy in to the project and deliver long term results.

Pick the things that need to be bought. I could have made a squat rack, but purchasing was the right move there. I could have purchased a platform, but building it was the right move there. Be deliberate in your choices. You don’t need to “buy” everything. You also don’t need to “build” everything. But choosing whether to build or buy can create ownership and buy-in from your staff. Choose appropriately.