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Software Development Has Been Complicated By Too Many Dependencies

Tate Galbraith
3 min readJun 23, 2022

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Photo by Elisa Ventur on Unsplash

Software should be simpler. Developers shouldn’t have to deal with bloated dependency-laden frameworks containing thousands upon thousands of modules and libraries. We shouldn’t spend more time getting the code that runs the code working. We shouldn’t get bogged down in mind-numbing configuration wrangling.

We need to go back to basics.

We need more ownership over our code.

We need our projects to be well understood and our dependencies to be relentlessly challenged.

Software developers should be craftsmen, not passengers along for the ride.

Ownership

In the earlier days of software development there was less hidden cruft. Less boilerplate. Less that you had to contend with before you wrote your first line of code. There weren’t cloud developer environments, there wasn’t some remote third-party repository that your entire application’s success hinged upon. There was only the code that you or your team wrote and maintained. You owned it.

You didn’t need to contend with the same level of dependencies that exist today. You could argue that these dependencies make our lives easier at the cost of obfuscated complexity, but I would much rather understand what happens under the…

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Tate Galbraith
Tate Galbraith

Written by Tate Galbraith

Software Engineer @mixhalo & die-hard Rubyist. Amateur Radio operator with a love for old technology. Tweet at me: https://twitter.com/@Tate_Galbraith

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