My general heuristic goes on the following questions: -> Is this project going to outlast my time on it? -> Is the problem I'm solving something that can be d

My general heuristic goes on the following questions: -> Is this project going to outlast my time on it? -> Is the problem I'm solving something that can be done in less than a couple pages of code with comments? -> Is there a minimal open-source library out there that solves this problem for my language? -> How many variants of this problem am I going to face? -> Are other engineers than me going to be working on it concurrently? -> If there is a library already out there, does it have good documentation? Those usually guide me pretty well, and in the event where I end up writing my own code, I look to either contribute to an existing library (yay pull requests) or to publish my library for other folks to use.