Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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575
· koehr

REMOVE ALL THE LIBRARIES!

All the things are evolved very much today. We have so much tools and
frameworks to make the daily developers life easier, that a complete overview is quite impossible.

But here sticks the problem: Many developers overuse these tools and most
probably cannot live without them anymore. This leads to in fact tiny projects grown huge just for the comfort of their developers.

Compfort is not a bad thing!

Actually, there are some good reasons for developer comfort. Most important are of course speed and maintainability. But there are counter-examples. Theandroid app of a quite popular todo list for example is about ten megabytes in size. But it's still just a todo app. Alot of websites are filled up with tons of javascript libraries, using only some percent of their functionality. With Visual Studio vom Microsoft you can click a RPC connected client/server thing in minutes with just a couple lines of code written by yourself. The final application sizes a couple of megabytes but has the functionality of ten kilobytes.

REMOVE ALL THE LIBRARIES!

Rather not, of course. But rummage through your dependencies and look which ones you really need and how much of them. Maybe there is a minor enhancement in developers comfort which costs consumers a significant amount of memory or bandwidth. Maybe you can skip this monstrous MVC framework for your Javascript web project and just use a tiny set of tools combined for all the functionality you need. Be a developer who can handle frameworks and helpful tools BUT knows what's behind the scenes. Don't just stick together an app if you are not able to do it without the mighty IDE.

Of course, bandwidth, disk space and computing power are cheap these days. But if we forget how to build an application, we will not be able to innovate any further.