This may also highlight one of the contrasts between my approach, and that of many of today’s engineers.
I am almost exclusively a Principal author of my work; with dozens of repos, and six figures of LoC (probably seven figures, if we include the code not available in public repos). I think I may have one forked repo; an embedded Web server library that I needed to tweak a bit to make work for my ffmpeg wrapper project.
This is not necessarily a good thing. By authoring my own code, I limit my scope. People who rely heavily on dependencies can have awesome results.
But they need to be very careful about the provenance and quality of these dependencies.
Dependency discovery is an important part of the vetting process. If we have choices, we don’t need to settle for second-best.
Also, I know that, for many folks, learning is a driver for repo discovery.
A lot of forks can indicate an inquisitive and open-minded approach to software development.
That's a fair point - and indeed I like those projects, not not just for finding good dependencies. I don't actually use that many external libs - but it's basically a version of "Show HN".
The projects can have interesting code to read or just show off a cool idea or a different way of implementing something than I'm used to.
I am almost exclusively a Principal author of my work; with dozens of repos, and six figures of LoC (probably seven figures, if we include the code not available in public repos). I think I may have one forked repo; an embedded Web server library that I needed to tweak a bit to make work for my ffmpeg wrapper project.
This is not necessarily a good thing. By authoring my own code, I limit my scope. People who rely heavily on dependencies can have awesome results.
But they need to be very careful about the provenance and quality of these dependencies.
Dependency discovery is an important part of the vetting process. If we have choices, we don’t need to settle for second-best.
Also, I know that, for many folks, learning is a driver for repo discovery.
A lot of forks can indicate an inquisitive and open-minded approach to software development.
I do support it; but it is not how I work.