Member-only story
Inline: a series about owning your business logic
Our Co-Dependent Relationship With JavaScript
Dependencies: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: in March of 2016, a disgruntled developer deleted 11 lines of his own open-source code and basically broke the internet. If you have been protecting your mental health by staying off social media for the past decade or so and don’t know this story, it’s pretty much .
Now before the flamethrowers come out in the comments, I think it is important to acknowledge that the removal of the left-pad package was only one small part of this particular literally-broke-the-internet story. As with any complex failure, I don’t think we’ll get to the bottom of it until we’ve asked “why?” five times, and if we do that then I think we’ll find that the dev who decided to take his ball and go home is not the real problem here.
At the end of the day, the reason the internet broke is because too many packages and too many organizations did not have a healthy relationship with their dependencies.
