I interpret you saying "I write my own tooling" to mean "I write my own tooling for any given project when other tooling exists that would fulfill the same need". If your write tools for other people, or for your own company as an end product, I would have expected to hear "I create tool chains for Javascript". Your statement makes it sound like you have an end goal which isn't the tooling. And that, when given the option to use pre-exisiting tools, you prefer the creation of your own. Given the context of the statement, I also interpret the subtext to mean "I'm a damn good JS programmer, so good, I be writing my own tools". It's a bit of a brag on your part. For the reasons that idealatry has pointed out, it really has the opposite effect of making you sound like an experienced programmer. If I read you correctly, I don't understand why you would create your own when the work of others is freely available for you to build off of. This just slows down your entire process down. The majority of these tools have huge user bases that gives assurance to their quality. They also come with the maintenance of the community for free. That's a big deal. By choosing not to use them its like flouting the wisdom of the masses (and your or your companies billable programmer hours). It all just comes off as a little less than humble. I'm sure the process of creating your own tools gives you deeper insight in to JS that many don't have. But wouldn't that time be better spent on your application? After all, tools are not the end product. Maybe I just don't understand enough about the JS toolchain ecosystem and the roles the current tools fill or fail to fill. But if I were as experienced as you at JS, I'd be bragging about the applications I created, not about the tools I made to support those applications (again, unless tools are your end goal)