Third-party scripts for small teams

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Most advice about third-party scripts assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to keep

Every tag you add is code you do not control. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

Where to start

Audit the list twice a year and cut what nobody reads. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What this looks like day to day

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about third-party scripts before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every tag you add is code you do not control — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.