"Hacking" and "Modding"

[Sven]

Life's too short to go around in circles re-inventing or Re-making anything, I prefer to do it right first time or not to bother.

For that to work you have to know what "right" is.
If you are doing something new there is a lot of stuff going on where "right" is still to be determined.

I do a lot of development on manufacturing equipment that works on a smaller scale than the machines you can buy.
Sure, I can buy a lot of the parts off the shelf somewhere but that costs money and even worse, time.

That is why I hack towards a working system as quickly as I can with usually parts from just the workshop or local diy store.
All too often I found that doing it right the first time meant that I had to do it again anyway, because the underlying assumption did not work.

For me, hacking my way to a working result and then doing it again to improve what does not work is always quicker than doing everything right the first time....