Depends what you mean by "need". Often when you need a piece of functionality, what you actually "need" is a small subset of what a third party app is wanting to provide, and I've often found simply using out-of-the-box apps for this adds a fairly huge amount of complexity that is just not needed.
My favourite case in point would be adding very simple blog functionality to something - which is fairly quick & trivial in django, but out-of-the-box blog solutions promote themselves with tempting-features-that-you-dont-really-need that inadvertently add a lot of complexity and before you know it you're a few releases down the line and you realize that the author doesn't really know how to use South properly and your db ends up in a slight migration-state-limbo forevermore.
Though note that I am _not_ saying don't use external dependencies - I use several of those listed in the article (I am a big fan of django-reversion) - but remember to look at everything with a critical eye before inclusion.
> This just smells of FUD to me
It's all very well and good saying that but a stack of previous bad experiences doesn't smell like FUD when you're on this end of them.
Ah, you're right there, if you're talking about a blog app, I agree with you. I had much smaller pieces in mind, such as the packages I mentioned before. Each one of those does one specific thing and does it well. Blogging is pretty much the worst example here because it's highly, highly custom to each person and easy enough to write that you wouldn't bother with a library, which would end up not doing what you want in the long run anyway.
Something like shortuuid, on the other hand, is pretty much a slot-in.
Depends what you mean by "need". Often when you need a piece of functionality, what you actually "need" is a small subset of what a third party app is wanting to provide, and I've often found simply using out-of-the-box apps for this adds a fairly huge amount of complexity that is just not needed.
My favourite case in point would be adding very simple blog functionality to something - which is fairly quick & trivial in django, but out-of-the-box blog solutions promote themselves with tempting-features-that-you-dont-really-need that inadvertently add a lot of complexity and before you know it you're a few releases down the line and you realize that the author doesn't really know how to use South properly and your db ends up in a slight migration-state-limbo forevermore.
Though note that I am _not_ saying don't use external dependencies - I use several of those listed in the article (I am a big fan of django-reversion) - but remember to look at everything with a critical eye before inclusion.
> This just smells of FUD to me
It's all very well and good saying that but a stack of previous bad experiences doesn't smell like FUD when you're on this end of them.