[nullspace]

Hah... I’m probably falling for Poe’s law here, but anyways... there are certainly cases where in-house is better than external dependency - specifically when your team knows the tech domain better than anyone external can... but in general well-maintained (preferably open source with a community, or a well funded company) external dependencies are almost always better. They usually would have the years of fixing edge cases and features that you would inevitably run into if you were to roll ur own.

[rmilejczz]

They’re also tailoring their solution to be as generic as possible.

Having written OSS and also having written enterprise applications, it seems plainly obvious to me why a homegrown solution is preferred. Code developed internally is understood by the team (you may not understand the underlying implementation of a dependency), and can be tailored exactly to suit your needs (ignoring edge cases that aren’t relevant, removing unneeded features). And you never have to worry about maintainers disappearing, breaking changes being introduced, or bugged releases that you can’t do anything about.

I don’t mean to sound crass but how on earth could you think this is an example of Poe’s law? What’s so extreme about being a responsible developer? I didn’t say “every solution should be developed in house” (though I think most large projects would be better for it!) obviously there’s is a cost associated with in house solutions and you should gauge that cost to see if it’s worth it for your application. But if you’re going to be working with that application for years and years to come then I highly recommend trying to write your own code instead of relying on libraries.

[nullspace]

To counter your arguments, I'm going to use a couple of typical examples of when an in-house versus open-source / external debate comes up. I'm not counting the infamous "leftpad" cases, those are usually trivial, and really don't matter in the grand scheme of things. If it's a one-liner, just implement it yourself.

1. A high level database or queue lib, or a custom / powerful serialization lib or, relevant to this topic) an ORM or other foundational/low-level part of your tech stack.

What you can expect to happen is a bunch of very good programmers early on build powerful abstractions using macros, metaprogramming, advanced type system concepts and build up a codebase adding up to a few thousands of lines. It just works, it's a good system - a few bugs are patched by the team every month, but that's fine. Fast forward a few years, the programmers have moved on, "onboarded" the rest of the team to the codebase during their respective last week, but given how complicated the codebase is no one is really capable of debugging it and fixing issues. And given that it's not open-source, it never got an opportunity to build a community of contributors. Your team is now SOL, and it's going to take _months_ to replace it with a more well-maintained open-source solution.

2. Building a A/B testing implementation in-house - again a couple of good programmers build a working, scalable, basic system in a weekend. It actually works and the code is good, simple, readable and well-tested. But then, your PM team or your Marketing team wants you do add graphs. Then export the data to RedShift. And then tweak the algorithms powering the backend. Then multi-arm bandit. And so on. Now, what was now a weekend project, turns into months of work - whereas there exist paid services that do this for you.

Sometimes, it's unavoidable, external alternatives are genuinely not good*. But I strongly think, you have to be very, very careful about building systems in-house when they are not your business.

> I don’t mean to sound crass but how on earth could you think this is an example of Poe’s law.

Sorry for this. I do feel quite strongly against your original comment (at least the way it was written without context), and I think it's the _opposite_ of being a "responsible developer" in all but edge cases, and think you are wrong. But calling it an example of Poe's law was not right on my part, and was harsh.

> But if you’re going to be working with that application for years and years to come then I highly recommend trying to write your own code instead of relying on libraries.

I've done this, and have done both in-house and oss code, but in-house, very reluctantly - for example - when there's just one or two maintainers committing code, and there's no alternative. But even then, I have usually forked the code and used that or parts of that as the base, rather than starting from scratch

[scarface74]

There is hardly ever a time where an in house solution is better than a third party one for cross cutting concerns. Most of the packages are open source.