One of the messaging apps that we are experimenting at work with is Slack. I’ve recently downloaded the Slack desktop app, and, out of curiosity as to what it was written in (because it’s 300MB after a few minutes of use), viewed it’s licence file.

The source code for Slack’s desktop app isn’t publically available, so I cannot link to it. But basically it has the licence for every open source library it uses. Almost all open source require the copyright notice to be included. And Slack had them all - all 420ish packages in a 10,000 line licence file.

Now to make this clear, I am all for using packages and libraries. It is not only a good idea, it is required for success of any project. Writing things from scratch is error prone, and you are basically throwing out money by not using OSS.

But 420 packages? I casually went through the list and picked one at random to see how complicated some of these packages are. I (and no mean to pick on the author of these packages here) found user-home - a package that tells you the path of the user’s directory. It is 2 lines of code. All the work is done in another project called os-homedir. Which in itself is under 25 lines of code, but I suppose there is some logic you want to re-use.

To the os-homedir/user-home author’s credit, they state that the library is to “Ponyfill” (like polyfill, but not replace the native implementation if it exists) older versions of Node.js.

None of this seems to make sense as Slack looks to package the runtime with their installer so they can choose to use the newer version.

So what are the downsides of using more packages? From a development standpoint, there are a few downsides:

• The time it takes to make a build. (1 time cost for developers, expensive when doing CI/regular builds)
• Keeping packages up-to-date. This is important for some but not all packages. This is something I don’t think many people do well even for a few package dependencies, but for 400+ I bet most are not up-to-date.
• Code size and complexity. No such thing as a free lunch, packages often come with features that go unused.

So what do you think? Such a thing as using too many package dependencies?

When the canvas API came out a number of years ago, I made a simple website to learn something about it. It was basically a white canvas that people can draw on it. Nothing super fancy, just 300x300 pixels that you can draw black lines on and save.

I think I made one mention of it in foxymonkies and that’s it, and pretty much forgotten about it. Until recently.

It turns out that there 442 user-created images over that time (some blank, but uniq isn’t filtering them out so there might be a dot or something odd there). Since I don’t keep a timestamp, I have no idea how recently these images were generated. Since there is no name, I have no idea who created most of these (most of them were definitely not me).

So I’m releasing it for your viewing pleasure and entertainment. Some of these are kinda nsfw if you work at some lame company where Michelangelo’s David is nsfw.

To not lose my 2 RSS viewers, I have moved the 400+ doodles into a seperate link.

For most of my childhood, money was always scarce. I don’t know whether it was actually the case or whether I just believed it was. I always felt bad asking for money or for stuff (anyone remember scholastics?!). $5 was a lot as a kid, but it bought a lot of stuff back then. It also meant that I was careful about what I spent my money on, and avoided spending money on myself. It also meant I tended to spend money on things rather than experiences, as things were a lot easier to quantify.

That hasn’t translated too well into adulthood. I became fixated on seeing my balance only going up. Everything needed to be planned out. Overspending this month meant I couldn’t spend much next month (or the next few months as was the case of my first car). While all these sounds like good habits to have, I was literally sitting on $20,000 worried over a few hundred. I was too worried to spend/invest that money.

In some ways that fear has served me well. I was able to buy my own place without any help. It was hard spending $40,000 that day, but it felt so liberating.

I am a lot better at spending money now (especially for things I need); but I still have challenges. I still have difficultly in spending money on things that make me happy. I will without hesitation spend an extra $1000 on paying down my mortgage (which is gonna last another 20 years regardless). But the amount of anxiety of doing the same thing for something I want? Ridiculous.