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The tragedy of running an old Node project

(abdisalan.com)
272 points abdisalan | 3 comments | 18 Nov 24 18:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.426s | source
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beardyw ◴[18 Nov 24 19:06 UTC] No.42175746[source]▶
I'm pretty sanguine about languages and frameworks, but I draw the line at node. I have seen so many horrors visited by dependencies, often to do just one thing where 2 or 3 lines of code would do the job anyway.

When I was managing teams, whatever the language, I would ban any new dependencies which I didn't personally agree with. A lack of control just creates a nightmare.

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1. CognitiveLens ◴[18 Nov 24 20:03 UTC] No.42176298[source]▶
Was that kind of control well-received by your teams? Out of context, it sounds like it would be pretty rough to be an engineer on a team where your manager had sole control over what tools you could use - I suppose it might make sense for junior devs or a very small codebase, but I would caution against taking that stance in a team where you want to facilitate mutual trust
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2. beardyw ◴[18 Nov 24 20:47 UTC] No.42176817[source]▶
Well back then there were fewer options, but the result was that completed products were easy to work with. Perhaps we live in different times.
3. mst ◴[19 Nov 24 09:54 UTC] No.42181705[source]▶
Provided the manager only rarely exercises the power, and is open to being persuaded not to, having somebody able to veto risky dependencies can be really quite useful.

Normally when I'm the one with that power we rapidly get to a general understanding of what's small enough that I (a) probably won't care (b) will take responsibility for tweaking the schedule to makre time to get rid of it if I do.

And 'big' dependencies are generally best discussed amongst the entire team until consensus is reached before introducing one anyway.