[OmarIsmail]

I'm going through this right now. At dayjob we have a lot of internal dependencies and libraries that are created sufficiently far from me that I treat them as third party and when things go wrong (which they do a lot) it's a nightmare to debug and work through. Easily half a day gone.

So for sideproject I'm going mostly bespoke and using very little 3rd party libraries. The result of that is there's sooooooo much boiler plate to write and it's very boring and it's hard to be motivated and productive to get through it. What's keeping me going is that once the boilerplate is done - it's mostly the foundational level of data queries + endpoints - then I shouldn't really have to touch that stuff again.

My conclusion is that there's no great answer.

Using lots of libraries is like riding a horse. It'll start moving right away but you don't have full control and you gotta find the right way to get it to do what you want, and may have to fight it if it really doesn't want to. Vs building most things yourself is like building a car. You don't go anywhere for a long time as you're building it, but once you've built it you can move very quickly and if anything goes wrong you can easily pop the hood and fix/change things up.

I think for long lived projects it's better to build the car, but also be disciplined in writing very good code + documentation. The initial build out sucks hard but that pain will get amortized over a very long future and ultimately be worth it.

And for absolutely required dependencies go with paid services. Specifically paid services where the company's primary focus _is_ providing that service. They are financially and existentially motivated to give good service, and are usually good about keeping backwards compatibility while usually staying on top of security/modernization upgrades without requiring work on your own end. A managed database is a good example of this kind of paid dependency.