Yes I generally use a similar strategy of avoiding dependencies and writing my own small library that does what I need. I also appreciate learning exactly what’s going on.

> Now if another dev inherits my code I doubt they’ll see it my way. . . . I don’t know yet if I’m being foolish or if I’ve stumbled on some ancient programmer wisdom

I have the same fear here. Lately I’ve been trying to keep a similar api to popular libraries so it would be easy to swap in the real library if ever needed.

But yes “at least I’ll probably never run into a leftpad issue.”