I had that same thought, that the time spent rolling their own system could be better spent just learning some existing good-enough thing.
A great way to get familiar with something is to be the folks who write it. It's also much more fun to design and implement something new than to just learn some other fella's software. I'm guilty of this myself.
But I've started to remind myself that "somebody else has had this problem" and there's probably a good enough solution out there already.
Put another way, is what you are trying to do really so novel? In the case of Uber's infrastructure, you would have to talk for awhile to convince me that they really really need something not-off-the-shelf.
A great way to get familiar with something is to be the folks who write it. It's also much more fun to design and implement something new than to just learn some other fella's software. I'm guilty of this myself.
But I've started to remind myself that "somebody else has had this problem" and there's probably a good enough solution out there already.
Put another way, is what you are trying to do really so novel? In the case of Uber's infrastructure, you would have to talk for awhile to convince me that they really really need something not-off-the-shelf.