[teamski]

My brain says never, for everything there is some turn-key thing. Even your entire project might be franksteined with some third-party products and Zapier into something working. Same with libs, better a crappy lib than working days for something you might not need.

My gut says always: most of the times turn-key stuff has weaknesses and good libs with perfect apis, well maintained and with a great community are rare but they are there of course.

Hard question since what the gut says is more fun while the alternative is just about gluing libs together. But using libs and once they don't fulfill your needs build yourself is the right but more boring way to go.

[BigJono]

Your brain is falling into the classic JS/NPM trap of thinking that dependencies are zero cost. The time it takes to use something is not 0, there's still a comparison to make. There's tons of stuff out there with APIs, documentation and community resources that are way more complex to navigate than whipping out a text editor and building something that handles your own use case.

[teamski]

You are nitpicking and TBH I don't get your message. My post was a general advice and the tendency of a creative mind, still you need to look into each case and decide if make or buy. And your NPM trap analogy is just blatantly wrong and doesn't help OP. You could have mentioned any package manager btw.

[BigJono]

I'm not nitpicking, I just picked out the first part of your post because it's the only bit I disagree with.

I'm saying it's dangerous to have this line of thought that the "correct" way to build a system is with a mish mash of third party libraries and that doing any non-glue coding yourself is only for fun. You're insinuating that the decision OP is making is between efficiency and fun, whereas in reality it's an optimisation problem for efficiency that a lot of people mess up because they don't understand one side of the equation. (and if OP wants to have fun and roll his own that's great but it's another case entirely, I'm assuming he's not asking HN for permission to do that).

I use NPM as an example because for JS devs in the places I visit it's becoming a cultural thing, which IME is not the case in other communities. I don't see as many python devs entertain the thought of maintaining something for years with "crappy libraries" in it for the sake of saving "days" of work. But in JS land that attitude is all over the place and the phrasing of the first bit of your post reminded me of it, so...