@cartman82 said in To library or not to library, that is the question:
Coding paradigms change. My code meshes well with my other code, so it all calcifies into one hodge-podge framework that is hard to tear apart. OSS code is by design modular and interchangeable.
Will my colleagues be able to maintain my code without me? Will they understand my vision for the code's organization and general usage pattern? Or will the next guy just bolt on their crap on top of mine? A 3rd party lib will generally have well established patterns, so there will not be problems like that.
Finally, will other coders even want to work on my artisinally made in-house framework? I mean, even if my thing is superior, once the time comes to update their CV, I bet they'd rather have "2 years of express+mongo+slim+whatevers-hip" there, than "2 years of cartman's internal framework no one's ever heard of before".
Pretty much sums up my feelings on it.
If it is a decent open source library that is actively maintained. used, popular and has unit-tests then use it.
At the moment me and another dev are making a .NET web app. I need to do some Image processing, I could use System.Drawing and write a load of code for cropping, rotation and a few other things we have to do with incoming images.
Or I could just use this http://imageprocessor.org/ and call crop, rotate etc.
I don't particularly like frameworks. I like micro-frameworks as I can just get the bits I need.