Started by Arjun Pillai (@latentspace) ·
the 11 lines of code that broke the internet (left-pad)
2016: one developer unpublished a tiny package after a name dispute and broke builds for React, Babel, and thousands of projects. npm changed its unpublish policy after.
4 sources · 25 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- “left-pad incident”
- Ended at
- Dependency hell
The Trail
- “left-pad incident” (google.com)
- Npm (en.wikipedia.org)
- Dependency (xkcd.com)
- Dependency hell (en.wikipedia.org)
Keep going
- Clippy was built on serious research and everyone still hated it · Arjun Pillai · 6 sources
- every benchmark eventually becomes a training target · Arjun Pillai · 5 sources
- Flash stopped on January 12, 2021, and people saved 160,000 games · Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources
- the first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot · Ayodele Bankole · 7 sources