Who hasn’t used a third party dependency in their software project?
The other day I came over a blog post by Justin Williams that offers a somewhat unorthodox perspective on deciding whether to use a third party dependency.
His general answer to the question «how should I manage third party dependencies?» is with as few third-party dependencies as possible.
I am most compelled by the following condition:
Can I understand the code base enough that I’m comfortable patching/contributing to it?
It is a somewhat counter-intuitive point. You’d think one reason to use someone else’s code is that they solve a problem above your pay-grade.
But it makes a whole lot of sense. What happens when something breaks? Can you wait for the maintainer of the dependency to fix the problem?
What do you think?
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