Comment by elktown
4 months ago
This is goes for a lot of things in tech unfortunately. For example, being stuck in a SRE/devops amusement park can be incredibly frustrating and surprisingly resource intense.
Sometimes it feels like we could use some kind of a temperance movement, because if one can just manage to walk the line one can often reap great rewards. But the incentives seem to be pointing in the opposite direction.
I'm beginning to develop a heuristic around the concept of "amount of the library you use". It's intrinsically fuzzy and still something I'm working on, but in general, it's bad to use only a tiny fraction of a library or framework, and really bad to have a code base in which a large number of things are pulled in that you only use small fractions of.
There are some exceptions, e.g., pulling in your languages best-of-breed image library to load some JPGs even though it supports literally a dozen other formats is less disastrous to a code base than pulling in an industrial-strength web framework just to provide two API calls with some basic auth of some sort. But there's something to the concept in general, I think.
That sounds like a good balance indeed.