I am confused as to whether it is acceptable to use code produced by other people for something that is related to me and my creations. Do i have to resort to coding my portfolio website with pure css and js to demonstrate my credibility and experience as a candidate employee? Does the ideology of ‘using other people’s tools to create a better product’ apply here in this context, or would it be considered plagiarism? Is there some sort of gradient as to how much i should use third party tools for my website for it be ethically appropriate, if it all?
Yes, you should use third party tools (just don’t take credit for them, maybe even credit the tools used in the footer). In a real job, you would leverage third party libraries to work more efficiently, so you should do the same when showing off your skills.
Yep, someone that insists on writing everything from scratch is sort of a red flag to me. Web development is mostly about knowing how to use third party packages and building on top of that.
Insists != for practice.
I’ve been mulling a “reverse engineer” for practice. But yeah, for the portfolio, you want to use the same ethos as you would use in the job