The Social Coding Contract

Dependency management tools make life easier than ever for developers but let's pause to consider the unintended consequences of open source

Social coding revolutionized how we share useful code with others. Bundler, npm, and Github made publishing and consuming code so convenient that our dependencies have become smaller and more numerous. Nowadays, most projects quickly resemble a Jenga tower, with layer upon layer of poorly understood single points of failure.

Despite our progress, we'd benefit from pausing to reflect on our relationship with open source. Convenience and ego drive most open source adoption, but these shortsighted motivations raise long-term problems we need to clearly identify if we can ever hope to solve them.