When you want a simple utility function that isn’t part of the standard library, what do you do? A. Find a library and use itB. Write the function and add it to an internally shared collectionC. Cut and paste from StackOverflow I’ve done all three in my twenty years of development, and I’m here to …
Lately I’ve been working in Node, and that means I have access to all the open-source modules on npm. It is easy to add a dependency on any of them. But is it a good idea? Not every library is production-grade. Not every library (or service) is something that I want my production code to depend …
Lately I’ve been wrestling with npm. Here are some rules I’ve learned: Use `npm ci` rather than `npm install` `npm ci` will bring down exactly the dependencies specified in package-lock.json. `npm install` does more than that; it also tries to update some libraries to a more recent version. Sometimes it updates URLs or nonsense in …
Developers have a love-hate relationship with code re-use. As in, we used to love it. We love our code and we want it to run everywhere and help everyone. We want to get faster with time by harnessing the work of our former selves.And yet, we come to hate it. Reuse means dependencies. It means …
Dependency management.Nobody wants to think about it. We just want this stuff to work.It is one of the nasty sneaky unsolved problems in software. Each language system says, we’ve got a package manager and a build tool. This is how dependencies work. Some are better than others (I <3 Elm; npm OMG) but none of …
I’m hella excited to get to work on Atomist full-time starting now (January 2017). Why? What do they do? Oh let me tell you! I love developing software, not least because we (as an industry) have not yet figured out how to software. We know it’s powerful, but not yet how powerful. Software is like …
Franklin Webber[1] went on a quest to find out whetherutility code was better or worse than core code in open sourceprojects. Utility code is defined as anything necessary but not directly related to the application’smission. Franklin found that overall quality of utility code was higher, perhaps because this code changes less. He also found a lot …