I found that I have a streak of masochism that I ought to get rid of. I like to be totally proprietary when I program.
Right now I'm making my own compression algorithm that takes my game scripts and applies a huffman encoding to them. Since a huffman algorithm uses a binary tree, the compressed file is entirely zeros and ones, so I apply run length encoding on that. Okay, that was a pointless explanation, but you get the picture. I can't stop reinventing the wheel. Zlib is probably a lot better than my compression algo., but I don't care. The only areas where I'll eat some tasty humble pie are in Graphics, Sound, and scripting (I'm using angelscript). I'm even going to try to make my own coding IDE. Now, you're probably saying 'dude, every programmer makes this stuff. You're just some stupid 14-year-old who thinks he's l33t (see title of journal).' Yea, well do you insist on USING the stuff you make all the time? Or do you go onto something better. I'll be saving my GameDev Tycoon until I write my own GUI system :)