Assessing the Value of Elixir Dependencies

In this post, Jason Stiebs from the Elixir community discusses the abundance of packages available for common problems in Elixir and the importance of evaluating whether to add a dependency or write a custom solution. Stiebs iterates that while it is tempting to use a library for interacting with AWS S3, for instance, due to the complexity of AWS APIs, there are downsides, like 'HTTP client bloat' and 'code-gen' libraries that can be difficult to work with and poorly documented. Stiebs then explores the possibility of taking ownership of these dependencies by creating a minimal custom client for S3 interactions using the Elixir HTTP client library 'Req', ultimately suggesting developers assess their dependencies and consider implementing the functionality themselves for a more controlled and tailored solution.