Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I get the point that you are making, but if something really only takes 15 minutes to do, I wouldn't necessarily use an open source solution just because one exists.

Depending on the situation, the library may have a ton of extra bloat that your application will never use. Also, recklessly deferring to open source libraries can potentially snowball into something like the left-pad fiasco[1].

[1]: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-npm



Yeah, and I get your point too. Eight lines of code? Yeah, you don't need a library. But usually when someone says "15 minutes" they mean 1 - 2 days. So things of that complexity is when it's obviously you should choose a good OSS lib.


It depends. In many cases you would be right, in many other cases you wouldn't.

It depends on many factors:

- what is the problem? (some problems are really hard, some problems are trivial and just seem hard)

- is developer experienced enough to build own solution?

- are existing solutions good or badly written?(I often refrained from using existing solution when I looked on bloated code in it).

- is solution suitable to project? ("too much bundle size", "doesn't support X", "not too configurable", "too slow", "too hard to use").

etc.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: