DEV Community

Discussion on: On the Occasional Misdiagnosis of "Not Invented Here Syndrome"

Collapse
 
jacobherrington profile image
Jacob Herrington (he/him) • Edited

One benefit of rolling your own stuff (which I agree you should avoid regarding foundational pieces of the stack) is the opportunity to attack a problem from first principles. That allows you to challenge a lot of the assumptions that exist in external libraries in the same space, sometimes coming up with a much simpler bespoke solution.

The obvious danger is when you think you can simplify authentication, so you spin up your own insecure auth library! The same goes for a large number of generic tasks (like you mentioned: ORMs, web frameworks, servers, etc).

As long as there is some intentional thought or dialogue put into writing your own solution vs. pulling in a third-party dependency it's usually easy to determine the better path.