My current programming project, my goal has been to do as much in-app as possible. Does that mean I'm more likely to have bugs in my own code? Yes. But I've learned a ton doing it, and I know that my code doesn't have a giant monster of bloat hidden behind some random dependency somewhere. And yeah, that means when I wanted to handle email, I learned a heck of a lot about how programs handle email. Did it take more time? Yup. Education is time well spent.

I've got two dependencies besides the basic framework my project is built on: A scheduling engine, and a database interface. I eventually hope to factor out both.