The "don't reinvent the wheel" argument often acts as though using a 3rd party lib is "free", and building it yourself is costly with no benefit. This is somet

The "don't reinvent the wheel" argument often acts as though using a 3rd party lib is "free", and building it yourself is costly with no benefit. This is sometimes true, but often not. From SFTP libraries to SVG rendering libraries, there have probably been about 3-5 major dependencies of my company's project that I have had to learn and extend or fix bugs in to make them work just in the last year. And sometimes this means using our own fork that we have to keep maintained. I'm not saying I would have rather written these particular dependencies from scratch, but they were definitely not cost free. Nor are they all of better quality than what I would have produced had I written them from scratch. That's the other common refrain - to "defer to the expertise of the crowd". Don't get me wrong, many 3rd party libraries are of great quality by amazing men and women who I am very thankful for. But certainly not all of them. There's no magic that says "every third party library is made by an expert with the highest standards".