I've been in the industry roughly for 4 years. I do front end development most of the time. And front end development is a relative term, so basically I just do html or php templates with some presentational javascript. Web designers like working with me because i've got an "eye for design" as they say.

I don't like using plugins. Although there are things I can't live without like jQuery.

But there's much more stuff that you can easily do yourself - off canvas navigations, animated burger buttons, some slideshow slider and so on. They bloat your site, they add functions or css that you don't need or worse - they break something. And sometimes even adjusting the plugin to your needs takes more time than writing a required component by yourself.

Recently I was working in a team with backend developer and designer. We were creating an e-commerce website. The checkout page designer has done and i've coded didn't look like what it should look when connected to the shop. It simply looked broken.

"The design can't be implemented because of an e-commerce plugin" - our back end dev said. "Can't you do a custom checkout solution so it looks like in design?" - i've asked.

He looked at me like i was crazy. After a long discussion we still were at the point where "plugin works like that and we can't change it".

It left me wondering. Why are we using tools we can't fully customise or edit? Tools that limit us? Time savings? Or is it because it's simply easier?

Have you ever been in situations like this? Where you have to adjust, change or even sacrifice some of the functionality because it doesn't fit the backend developers requirements/needs ?