[hluska]

I'm not sure how long you've been a JavaScript dev or how senior you are, so forgive me if this sounds condescending. For what it's worth, I'm genuinely not trying to be condescending.

As I matured into the profession, I went through stages of dependency. In the beginning, I wanted to build everything myself because I was learning. In retrospect, this was a good choice because I was way too green to pick a dependency and at least I knew my own code was crap. Then, I reached a place where I wanted to stand on everyone's shoulders - I agreed that any code I had to write myself was code I had to maintain myself.

Lately, I see all the grey in between those two points. I'd sooner not try to reinvent React because that would take me an obscenely long time. But, for more trivial things like left-pad or escape-string-regex, I've discovered that it's cheaper to implement and maintain it myself than to go through all the steps to vet a new dependency.

There's a strange place in this industry where rolling your own solution is cheaper in the long run.

[RealDinosaur]

I never suggested left-pad myself, but what I would do is copy and paste a function off stack-overflow, name it appropriately, and encapsulate it, maybe write a test that is the flavour of the month.

Then leave a link to the page I got it from in the comment above.

I'm about 5 years into my career, and have re-invented the wheel in the past myself. It's great fun to make these huge rude-goldberg-esque inventions but for making an MVP, it simply isn't worth it.

Specifically avoiding libraries like express, react, ORMs or crypto though... People love to do that, and far too often it ends up living for eternity.

I always advocate... don't bother. :)

[hluska]

I don't recall meeting a developer honest/confident enough to admit to copy/pasting off of Stack Overflow. That takes one heck of a lot of courage.

I don't actually know you, but I like you. That was really great to read!

[LandR]

I've been a professional developer for 15+ years, I don't think I've ever seen anything posted on stack overflow of high enough quality that I would happily paste it into a production system.

Great to use a guideline for a problem... but copy and pasting from stack overflow (even with a comment to that page, which i've seen!) just no!

[hluska]

I'm inclined to agree with you, though I still think that RealDinosaur deserves a lot of credit. He or she was still honest and forthcoming about that. It's impossible to start teaching better practices if people aren't honest about what they do!