Chapter 24. Dodging Silver Bullets for Scalable Freelance Projects

Does the idea of a code library fulfilling a significant portion of a freelance project that you're contracted into, sound appealing? It's OK, you can be honest and say yes, whether you're an active freelance developer today, or will be in the future.

When I started out on my freelance journey, any time I came across a large feature request, the first thing I'd do was check to see if there was a code library that took care of the requirement. In the development world, code libraries like these are called silver bullets.

However, as appealing as it may sound for a plugin or library to take care of the lion's share of a project, it's been my experience that this approach ends up taking longer to implement than simply building the components from scratch.

The problem with silver bullets

Let's start off with a practical case study. A few years ago, I took on a fleet management project...