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?
Naturally the answers to your questions depend on who is looking at the website, but from my experience…
Yes.
Absolutely not. It’s showing that you can incorporate the works of others to build something great rather than spend time reinventing the wheel. Nobody’s going to look at your website’s source (assuming you link to it somewhere), see a bunch of
.tsor.jsxfiles, and think “oh this person invented Typescript/React/whatever”.Should you need to reinvent Javascript, your browser, your OS, etc…? Probably not, and as long as you’re using something built by others to build your website (vscode, node.js, etc), there’s no reason to feel like using a library wouldn’t be the same. Also, for most real world projects, you’ll be using libraries you didn’t write. This is just showing that you know how to use them.
Where it would be unacceptable is if you claimed to have created those libraries/tools yourself.