From homemade functions to npm install everything: dependency culture shift
Description
Screenshot of a dark-mode tweet UI. A small profile avatar (face blurred) and the handle are shown at the top. Tweet text reads: “Developers back then: ‘Let's implement everything ourselves. We cannot afford to pay 100k for all the libraries we need.’ Developers today: ‘LOL. npm install left-pad reverse-string print-doggo-terminal send-nudez dancing-cat’”. The timestamp “16:24 · 03 Oct 22 · FeedHive.io” appears in blue at the bottom. The meme contrasts earlier frugality and self-written code with modern JavaScript culture that pulls numerous micro-packages via npm, parodying notorious modules like left-pad. Technically it highlights dependency proliferation, package management convenience, and the risks of over-reliance on tiny third-party libraries
Comments
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Writing left-pad ourselves: 30 seconds. Auditing the 1,600 transitive copies we already ship: two sprints, three lawyers, and a “high-severity” in Jira that never closes
We went from "Not Invented Here" to "Not Invented Here... yet, but give me 5 minutes to publish is-even to npm and collect my 10 million weekly downloads."
Ah yes, the pendulum swing from 'Not Invented Here' syndrome to 'Definitely Not Implementing Here' syndrome. We went from paying enterprise licensing fees that could fund a small country to depending on 47 packages maintained by a single developer who hasn't committed since 2019. At least when left-pad broke the internet, we learned that our entire CI/CD pipeline's stability rests on someone's weekend hobby project. Modern architecture: it's turtles all the way down, except the turtles are unmaintained npm packages with 3 weekly downloads
We traded a $100k vendor invoice for 1,372 transitive maintainers and a 300MB node_modules - CFO happy, SRE on-call forever
Old trade-off: build vs buy; new one: build vs npm install and a 1,500-entry SBOM, hoping left-pad doesn’t unpublish at 3am
Left-pad proved that in npm land, your monolith's single point of failure is a 5-line util some rando maintains