The Era of Micro Packages

I’ve been planning to write a blog post about this for a long. Building small, focused modules/package means reusability and makes it possible to build larger, more advanced apps.

As stated by Douglas McIlroy, Unix programs have always been expected to follow the concept of DOTADIW.

Do one thing and do it well.

Some people are obsessed about the LOC (Lines of Code). You shouldn’t care about it. It’s not the key to modular development. All you need to know is how to use the Lego blocks to build a castle. But even Modularity is a powerful concept, but like anything else, it’s not a magic stick.

One programmer broke the internet

There was a situation in 2016. A man named Azer Koçulu broke the internet by removing just a micro-package named left-pad. Because many projects use it as a dependency. The impact of these was large as it was being used in numerous very popular projects like Babel, Atom, React, etc.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

2. https://kodfabrik.com/journal/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules

3. https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breaking-of-the-internet-3d4d2a83aa4d

4. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/in-defense-of-hyper-modular-javascript-33934c79e113/

5. https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/12017