Ask HN: Are there any companies that avoid too many dependencies/services

2 pointssushshshsh5y ago2 comments

Hello,

I've worked for a few companies now that all follow a similar pattern: using 20 different AWS/Azure services and many many long lists of dependencies for things that could seemingly just be a self-written function.

I understand the arguments for "tried and tested" libraries and not wanting to "re-invent the wheel", but I really am sinking wayyyy too much of my time debugging and trying to understand how all of these things work internally. The actual basic functionality of the JIRA tickets I get can be solved in 10 minutes (basically just string manipulation)

Are there any companies out there who have the more old school mindset of just writing a function that does one specific thing really well, instead of having to juggle all of these import statements, long constructor argument signatures, builders, factories, etc?

One looks at the Super Mario 64 source code and just weeps.

2 comments

viraptor5y ago

Many regulated industries.

Lots of developers using smaller embedded platforms.

Corpos with strict licensing requirements where it's less hassle to roll your own JSON parser than to file requests for library use to lawyers with justification (go through approval process for a single version of dependency (each version needs new approval)).

As you can expect the other extreme also has significant downsides...

sushshshshOP5y ago

Hehehe... appreciate this answer. I wouldn't mind writing my own JSON parser because at least I can reason about how the code works, the only context I need is my language's syntax and not someone else's design assumptions :)

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