Building out products and features is no longer about owning all the code used. As technology continues to grow at an astronomical rate, it remains necessary to utilize open-source code in the form of third-party packages and APIs.
Third-party packages and APIs enable you to leverage code written by other individuals to get to your goals faster and build out desired features with ease. A great example of this would be the requests package in Python. This package lets you simplify HTTP requests so you can automate your processes without worrying about the overhead. Though requests is a highly used and well-maintained package, there are thousands of other projects out there which can be leveraged—so how can you decide which package is best to use? Integrating with third-party code can be broken down into 3 major areas of consideration: vetting the package, determining security risks, and implementing the code.