Agreed. Until you’ve programmed something with a magnetized needle and a steady hand, it’s not from scratch. I think somewhere between the “here is an HTTP proxy in 0 lines of code because I just used nginx/haproxy/varnish and wrote no code”, “here it is in 10 lines of code using Twisted/Tornado/Flask/whatever framework”, “in 100 lines using Ruby’s or Python’s stdlib”, and “I wrote it in C/Rust/Go using nothing but language primitives” the real work happens. Where that line is, is subjective because we are all at different places in what we know already and what we are currently learning. To my the only issue would be if people who know more try to misrepresent something to people who know less. As long as the goods are correctly labeled, it all has a place: we all need to know how to configure nginx, how to proxy a request using Twisted or Ruby’s standard library, and how to write a basic web server. I just think we should be careful not to mix them up.