Building software : Open source libraries or build from scratch (or using ready APIs)?
@indie hackers, what is your choice when it comes to building/adding software utilities in your app/project?
Say for instance that you’re building an app/website where users need to select the country code before entering their phone number when registering or checking out.
And you also want to send an invoice (in PDF) to the user after they check out, and would like to watermark this invoice and send it to the user by email. You can probably think of many similar examples of utilities that you have used in your applications.
In order to do so, you basically have three options:
-
you could decide to build these utilities in-house,
-
you could go with finding and making use of external utility libraries that can be directly embedded in your code/application, or finally
-
you could opt to use external utility services.
There are, of course, pros and cons to all sides:
https://apyhub.com/blog/why-utility-as-a-service-is-a-critical-component-of-the-developer-toolset
Looking forward to your thoughts,
