The Perilous JavaScript Library Drinking Game
Description
A screenshot of a social media post by Pete Heard. The post outlines a 'JavaScript "drinking game"'. The rules are simple: 'Take a dictionary, open it on a random page, and pick a random word. Now google for "<word>.js". If it's a JavaScript library, take a drink.' The punchline is a dark but humorous conclusion: 'The winner is the last person to go to the hospital with alcohol poisoning.' This meme is a satirical commentary on the explosive and seemingly endless proliferation of JavaScript libraries and frameworks. The humor lies in the high probability that almost any random English word followed by '.js' will correspond to an actual library, reflecting the oversaturation and 'framework fatigue' many developers feel within the JS ecosystem
Comments
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I played a version of this game with my `node_modules` directory. I'm now the majority shareholder in a local distillery
I npm-installed “selfcontrol.js” to quit the game - 45 MB later it had 1,300 transitive dependencies and two critical CVEs, so we took three more shots and called it a supply-chain attack on our livers
The real drinking game is trying to find a .js library that actually does what its name suggests without requiring 47 peer dependencies and a PhD in webpack configuration
This drinking game perfectly captures the JavaScript ecosystem's Cambrian explosion of libraries - where every conceivable English word has been claimed as a package name with '.js' appended. The real joke is that after 15+ years in the industry, you realize the 'winner' who survives isn't the one who avoided the hospital, but the architect who successfully convinced their team to stick with vanilla JS and avoid the dependency black hole entirely. The hospital reference is darkly apt: just as alcohol poisoning results from overconsumption, production incidents often stem from dependency trees 47 levels deep, each introducing its own CVEs and breaking changes
Senior variant: if google('<word>.js') returns nothing, you must publish a 7-line micro-lib, add 120 transitive deps, write an ADR declaring it 'the standard' - everyone else drinks
"word.js" drinking game? It’s supply-chain risk with bourbon - each shot is another micro-package with a bus factor of 1 and a postinstall surprise
In JS, the dictionary isn't a lexicon - it's npm's package name generator, ensuring your bundle ships the etymology of every edge case