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Build vs Buy has no universal answer.

Do you build? Or do you buy into the support level, the features, the bugs, the availability, the security, etc.



My rule of thumb is, write it yourself until it's painful, and spend a day looking for a good library to reduce the pain. If you can't find it after a day, or if you found one but it's taking longer than a day to configure it for your needs, try to write one yourself. This rule has not done me wrong yet. It's how I ended up moving away from Mobx and Redux in favor of RxJS and setState (just submitted a post about how to do this), and why I moved from Vue to React. But it is very subjective and subjectivity gets harder the more people you have on a team working on the same code.


I've actually come to prefer the opposite. I'd argue that the liability associated with third-party deps makes them debt. Debt is great for growth and experimentation. It works in a pinch especially if the experiment fails and you can just toss the dependency. So, today I'd rather buy, then build when I know I want to take on the pattern for better ops and long-term ownership.




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