Don't fear reinventing the wheel.

It's considered one of the most popular mistakes between programmers. Reinvent the wheel. Again and again programmers are constantly reinventing things. It's a big waste of time, and usually the resulting code is of a much lower quality than "wheels" which have existed for a long time, which had most of their bugs solved, which have been used and abused for all kinds of things...
But there are exceptions. Some times, reinventing the wheel is useful. Sometimes we don't need an overengineered wheel. We don't need the fast wheel for a formel-1 car, we don't need the strong wheel of a  big transport device, we need a simple, small wheel which just can carry our luggage. In that case, simplicity over all, our own wheel, although technically worse in many aspects, can be good for our project.
And of course, there is a time where reinventing the wheel has a clear advantage: learning. There is no better way to ler how a wheel works than reinventing it (even though after doing that we can see that existing wheels are better than our, but then we can use them with knowledge of doing the right thing).