So you’ve written a cool open source library. It’s at the point where it’s useful. You’re pretty excited. Even better, it seems like something that might be useful at your day job. You could go ahead and integrate it. Win-win! You get to work out the rough edges on your open source project and make progress on your professional project.
This is tricky ground and it’s not as win-win as you might think. Integrating a new dependency, whether its one maintained by a team-mate or not, requires communication. Everyone on the team will have to know about the dependency, how to work with it, and how to maintain it within the project. If there’s a deal-breaking concern with the library, consider it feedback on your library; it either needs to better address the problem, or it needs better documentation to address why the problem isn’t so much a problem.
It all comes down to communication. Adding a dependency, even if you know the person who wrote it really well, requires collaboration from your teammates. If you’re not talking to your teammates, you’re just cowboy coding.
Don’t cowboy dependencies into your project!
