Everything wrong with developer tools in a single paragraph

| dagger | devops |

I’m working on making a Dagger module for Wrangler, a CLI from Cloudflare that allows you to manage worker projects.

In their docs it feels like they summarize everything wrong with modern dev tools in a single paragraph:

To install Wrangler ↗, ensure you have Node.js ↗ and npm ↗ installed, preferably using a Node version manager like Volta ↗ or nvm ↗. Using a version manager helps avoid permission issues and allows you to change Node.js versions. Wrangler requires a Node version of 16.17.0 or later.

  1. Telling me to go install a bunch of external software before I can install your thing
  2. Giving me 4 different links to install 4 different pieces of software on my machine almost guaranteeing that its going to be different for my colleagues and in CI
  3. Giving me too many decisions. Do I need all of this software? What if I don’t want to use a version manager? Which one should I pick? This turns a simple README into 4 side quests.
  4. Why do I need to install software to manage versions at all? Why can’t the CLI just accept a parameter?

I don’t mean to pick on Cloudflare, we’ve all been doing this to ourselves for decades. Stuff like this makes me feel excited that Dagger is solving this once and for all.

In other news, this blog is now hosted on Cloudflare Pages and is being deployed using my Wrangler for Dagger module. 🤓

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Weekend Update #12

The weekly update, plus bits and bobs that caught my attention this week.

via ODonnellWeb March 30, 2025

Katherine Yang

Artist, developer, crafter

via Uses This March 30, 2025

"An off switch? She'll get years for that."

Vizio: "Please enjoy falling asleep to these calming nature scenes, occasionally punctuated with unhinged fascist rants. As a treat." I left the tv idle while I went to the other room to play with my dog. After about a half an hour, I started heari…

via jwz March 29, 2025

Generated by openring