Developers, it’s time to start building your own toolkit.

If you’ve been writing code for a while, then you’ve surely experienced them: these little (or not-so-little) functions you write over and over. These functions are peppered throughout all of your various projects, scripts, repositories, or homework.

And now —

You’re working on a project and you need to write a function to do a thing. Ah, but you already did that on a previous project. So, you do what any warm-blooded mammal does in this situation: open up the old project, copy and paste it into your new project, cartoonishly crack your knuckles and then continue to hack the mainframe.

Or —

Don’t copy it into you project!

Instead, create a new project in that-IDE-you-love, and create a new library in the language that you’re using. Slap that function in there like a hot pastrami on marbled rye, write a unit test to make sure it doesn’t shit the bed, and then ✨voilá✨ you created your own toolkit. She may be a small, frail toolkit now — but in time she will grow big and strong like an elephant.

Elephants never forget —

Some time has passed now, and that old project has been shipped with a pink bow. You’re now embarked on a new project! Oh boy… you thought you could escape it, but lo, it’s time to do that thing…