Personal Web Widget Libraries are a Good Thing

There's plenty of 3rd-party libraries for web widgets and design systems, e.g. Tailwind, Material Design, Bootstrap. Why reinvent the wheel?

I think there are good reasons that will often justify writing your own widgets.

First, they aren't that hard to write. I think many web developers overestimate the difficulty when they are starting out.

They can fit a particular niche or sensibility you have. For my web widget library, I'm not trying to make widgets that will work for everyone. I made them for simple, friendly-looking web apps with an emphasis on letting a new user understand screens quickly. I'm willing to trade off against other goals like attracting power users that want maximal functionality in compact UIs.

The extra time you spend writing a widget could be paid back. Maybe you avoid hassling with a third-party library's conventions to get an exact widget behavior you want. And then there is time spent patching security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries and their transitive dependencies.

In the video below, I expand on these thoughts while I demo my widget library. The create-decent-apps tool has vendored in a small subset of this library.