> If you have the right tools it's often quicker to implement something from scratch than going to all the trouble of downloading compiling and installing somet

> If you have the right tools it's often quicker to implement something from scratch than going to all the trouble of downloading compiling and installing something that somebody else has written. Heavily agree. Shameless self plug, this is the philosophy behind Distilled[0]: provide a good-enough, low-abstraction tool so you can build on top of it without it getting in your way or forcing you to memorize configuration options. Adding unnecessary black-boxes to your code can occasionally come back to bite you. I try not to be religious about this, but I am a little biased towards avoiding the abstractions of the 3rd-party libraries unless they come with a lot of benefits. A big "aha" moment for me was trying to teach interns how to use Grunt/Gulp, and eventually realizing that just teaching them Bash was easier. Then I started noticing other stuff -- for example, that the documentation for our inline documentation library was longer than some of the documentation pages we were generating with it. There's a principle here that's true for abstractions in general[1], but I find it is especially true for some 3rd-party dependencies. I regularly need to read the source code of 3rd-party dependencies that I use, so I no longer treat them as free. Obviously this stuff isn't a hard rule. I still use 3rd-party dependencies. But there's a balance here. You should be at least a tiny bit cautious about ready-made solutions. [0]: https://distilledjs.com https://distilledjs.com [1]: https://peertube.danshumway.com/videos/watch/2daaee22-4d92-47cf-a211-9d44a5e3e50a https://peertube.danshumway.com/videos/watch/2daaee22-4d92-4...