I was dead wrong about component libraries being a waste of time

Back in 2019 at a startup in Denver, I swore building our own component library from scratch was the only way to go. Thought prebuilt stuff like Material UI would just slow us down and make everything look generic. After 6 months of constant rework and fighting with inconsistent button styles across 3 different projects, I finally caved and tried Ant Design. It cut my development time by about 40% and honestly the consistency was way better than anything I was cobbling together. Has anyone else had a similar flip where they swore off something and then ended up loving it?

2 comments

2 Comments

river1835d ago

Actually Ant Design came out of Alibaba in 2016, not from any big US tech company like a lot of folks assume.

nathanking5d ago

That part about "not from any big US tech company" really stuck with me too. It's wild how many people just assume all the popular tools come out of Silicon Valley when there's so much good stuff coming from everywhere else.