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Jonas Grøndahl
Jonas Grøndahl

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"Too complicated, a library will handle it"

Hello everybody,

I recently got an exercise where I had to make an element resizable as well as draggable. The element should have a handle in each corner allowing the user to resize in all 4 directions.

This turned out to be very difficult for me and even after implementing it, I'm not 100% understanding every calculation that had to be done in order to make it work. I wish I had the option to use a library, but on the other hand it was fun to implement it from scratch.

When was the last time you had a moment of thinking:

"Hmm, this seems complicated, surely a library 📚 will handle it"

when trying to implement certain functionality but then went ahead and implemented it yourself or even proceeded to use that library?

Top comments (1)

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Michael Caveney

I think it's appropriate to reach for a library when it solves a problem in a very standard way and is battle tested. I always go back to that thing that Kent C. Dodds said about making yourself feel the pain of a problem before you reach for a dependency or a library to solve it for you. But it must vary by problem type, right? For example, Moment.js takes away a lot of the pain of working with dates (provided the bundle size isn't too big). On the other hand, how many React devs reached for a solution like Redux for state management when the built-in state management tools and techniques (even before Hooks) were more than sufficient? This definitely is a case-by-case thing.