Everything wrong with developer tools in a single paragraph
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.
- Telling me to go install a bunch of external software before I can install your thing
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- Lev Lazinskiy
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Convert Markdown to PDF in Sublime Text
- Terminal RSS Reader With Nom
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
- tweet from Derek Sivers blog
- My life was changed by four sentences in four books from Derek Sivers blog
- The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot from Escaping Flatland
- 45 things from Sean Voisen
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Sunday Steamy Sunday
Sunday Steamy Sunday I was supposed to get up and go birding this morning, but it was going to be 87F (28C) and very humid by the time we finished, so I'm here blogging from the comfort of my air-conditioned home instead. We planned on heading into Richmon...
via CHRISOD.ORG June 14, 2026Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide
The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783)...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries June 13, 2026“They had the simplest task in the world.”
This is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26. This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item pe...
via Unsung June 13, 2026Generated by openring