Implementing libraries or plugins can sometimes be a nuisance. Increasingly, if something doesn’t seem super straightforward the fastest way to get an answer is to search Github for the line of code you’re working with. It’s almost inevitable that someone else has already incorporated this library or plugin into their project and come up with a solid way to do it. If it’s on GIthub and open source, go for it!

Is there any dishonor in this? Not in my mind. Sometimes, yes, it’s good to figure stuff out on your own but when you have so much you want to do within your, hopefully, novel project then why waste precious time futzing around with setup and worrying about dependencies.

Even once you know that this is a time saving trick you actually should add it to a time-saving checklist. I keep one like this. It helps remind you what to do first when troubleshooting anything. I think our minds always tun to search Google first and then we end up reading threads on Stackoverflow but what I am suggesting here requires one to override this impulse and, if the code you’re working with is probably widely used, search Github before Google.