Lev Lazinskiy

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.

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. 🤓