This is a little hard to explain because it's a really generic question, but bear with me... I find that when I am doing or recreating basic things from scratch (i.e. without the help of libraries), sometimes it feels as though I'm taking much more time to do the task than is actually needed.

I am not new to programming or development & design concepts and have worked extensively with around 9 languages and various platforms and paradigms over 5/6 years. Although I don't yet have any academic qualification for programming and have learned almost exclusively from the Internet, I have been told that the quality of my code is excellent by those with qualifications.

So, I don't think I'm a bad programmer because I really love doing it and working with software architecture, but maybe I'm slow? Or is it normal to take sometimes longer than it seems necessary to do basic tasks?