Eleven lines, and thousands of builds
In March 2016 an eleven-line package was unpublished and broke builds across the ecosystem. The code was trivial; the dependency graph was not.
BREAKAGES →
Ten years of writing a dollar sign and meaning it
John Resig released jQuery in 2006 because browsers disagreed about everything. It stayed on a majority of measured sites for roughly a decade after the disagreements were settled, which turns out to be a fact about how the web is maintained rather than a fact about the library.
READ THE PIECE →
01
2006
Resig presents jQuery at BarCamp NYC. One library writes a single path through the browser disagreement and hands developers one surface.
02
2016
The Selectors API has been effectively universal since Internet Explorer 9 in 2011. The measured share of sites carrying jQuery does not move.
03
11
Lines of code in left-pad, unpublished on 22 March 2016. Builds across the ecosystem stopped resolving within hours.
The standard made most of it unnecessary and nobody noticed
The Selectors API gave browsers native querySelectorAll, which covered the single most common reason to load the library. Adoption barely moved.
A support table became the thing people argued from
Can I Use turned browser support into a citable artefact, which changed technical arguments from opinion into a shared reference.
DISAGREEMENT →A dependency became free to add and expensive to audit
npm launched in 2010 and made installing someone else's code a single command. The cost moved from adding it to knowing what you had added.
A maintainer handed a popular package to a stranger
The 2018 event-stream incident began with an ordinary handover of an unpaid maintenance burden, which is the part that has not been solved.
JSON won because it was already there
Douglas Crockford documented rather than invented JSON, and it displaced heavier formats by needing no parser anybody had to install.
Colophon