I've worked on a couple of projects at this point & almost everywhere I've installed dependencies/libraries that I need. Don't get me wrong, I can't imagine working without them. But I've noticed that I've been avoiding them lately. Libraries greatly help me to iterate software specially when I want to test out if a project is worth building or not.
I want you to consider the following example. You're working a company XYZ & you're building their main
product/service. You are supposed to build a feature that will allow users to upload a multi part file
to the server. You've never done this before & so you decide to use a libary P. You do a quick
yarn add p & you call a global function that P provides say uploadFile(file). You're done.
Wooho! You've built the feature. You're happy, everyone's happy. You push your code to the repo & you go
home.
Now, you're back at work the next day & there's a change in the plans by the management. They want
to validate the file before it's uploaded. You're like "Oh, I can do that". You go to the docs of
P but now you realize, P doesn't support this feature yet. You go to the issues & you see that
there's either a dead issue or your use-case was never considered before. You open an issue but now
you're stuck waiting for the maintainer. You don't understand the code because P so you can't really do
anything by yourself. You're stuck.
I've been through this quite a couple of times. Now, this isn't a problem with P. I'm there's
a lot of hard work that goes into building a library. Maintainence is a lot of work. Trust me, I highly respect
maintainer's with all of my heart (Thank You!). But, I've noticed that I've been avoiding libraries when I can.
I've been trying to come up with my own solutions to problems where I know that putting in that extra
5 hours will save me a fuck ton of time in the future.
PS: Hey, startups. This does not apply to you. Use a fuck ton of libraries. Your job is to iterate fast.
The key I want you to take away is to, find a balance. Use libraries if you can't avoid it but don't be afraid to build your own solutions. That's all what software engineering is about I guess. <3