Hell hath no fury like an engineer angered! This was such a good read and epitomizes hacking:
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."
Learning things is good. I also find I care more about the outcome and timeline than many professionals do, because I have to deal with the end result. That's not to say professionals can't or won't do the job better, or that they don't have more applicable experience to do the job more efficiently, but evaluating professionals is often as much or more work as learning how to do the job myself and just doing it. On average, the end result is at least better than a poor professional, sometimes as good or better than an average professional.
Recently I had to do some changes to a 3d rendering my contractor provided so I learned Krita to do it. Dare I say the results were not bad. But as good as a professional designer? Of course not. Was it satisfying to be able to show him exactly what I wanted? Hell yeah.
Well, it would be nice to be able to use my Kindle 4 again... Thanks to KOReader, it's no longer a brick, but most of my ebooks are kept hostages at Amazon.
They still have to request every 5 pages separately so they could be caught for requesting pages faster than you could realistically tap through the book on an actual phone or tablet.
"Was it worth it? To read one book? No. To prove a point? Absolutely. To learn about SVG rendering, perceptual hashing, and font metrics? Probably yes."