logoalt Hacker News

AIorNotyesterday at 11:04 AM3 repliesview on HN

So your supposed to write your own posthog? be serious


Replies

anonymous908213yesterday at 11:16 AM

Yes. If your shop is serious about security, it is in no way unreasonable to be building out tools like that in-house, or else paying a real vendor with real security practices for their product. If you're an independent developer, the entirety of Posthog is overkill, and you can instead write the specific features you need yourself.

show 1 reply
exasperaitedyesterday at 11:29 AM

I tell people this over and over and over: every time you use a third party dependency, especially an ongoing one, you should consider that you are adding the developers to your team and importing their prior decisions and their biases. You add them to your circle of trust.

You can't just scale out a team without assessing who you are adding to it: what is their reputation? where did they learn?

It's not quite the same questions when picking a library but it is the same process. Who wrote it? What else did they write? Does the code look like we could manage it if the developer quits, etc.

Nobody's saying you shouldn't use third party dependency. But nobody benefits if we pretend that adding a dependency isn't a lot like adding a person.

So yeah, if you need all of posthog without adding posthog's team to yours, you're going to have to write it yourself.

show 1 reply
dkdbejwi383yesterday at 11:06 AM

If they have a HTTP API using standard authentication methods it's not that difficult to create a simple wrapper. Granted a bit more work if you want to do things like input/output validation too, but there's a trade-off between ownership there and avoiding these kinds of supply-chain attacks.

show 1 reply