Stop fucking using dependencies!

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寮、 2022/03/29 — technology, webdev

I’m pretty tired of having to fix projects of customers that keep collapsing because their original developers decided to spam with dependencies for literally everything.

Even for something like the CURL library, which is part of PHP itself, I’ve seen multiple libraries being used in a single project (I ASSume it’s because they tested one, didn’t work and installed a different one, and never bothered to deleting the previous one ever again).

What I do in this case is I just copy/paste the CURL function from one of my own projects, delete all the CURL libraries, replace all the lines of code where CURL is used (read: takes me a couple of hours), and shit just works!

To see what I mean:

  1. Go to https://packagist.org/explore/
  2. Type “curl”.
  3. Notice how many libraries get pooped out.

Guys!
All you need is this:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.curl.php
It’s portable (works in PHP and all the bloatware/frameworks), and it fucking works!
And if it doesn’t, just install php-curl (on Debian: “sudo apt install php-curl”), and then it will work.

As a bonus, you’ll start to actually understand your own code too.

What’s worse is when they start using dependencies to fix a problem with a dependencies of a PHP framework, just because they don’t know how to do it the right way.
Or they use a dependency of 100s of MiB which literally only does “setcookie()” and “echo $_COOKIE” in the OOP way.
Sure, let’s just launch a ballistic missle with remote controls just to kill a mosquito, why the fuck not…