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**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When I was in the military we had this really awesome term that I still live by. It is PMCS. It stands for Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services. And legitimately, every time I got into a vehicle, I could not just get into it and just drive. I had to do this series of checklists every single ... |
\[47:59\] So we had this PMCS mindset just ingrained in us, from emptying out connexes to just confirm what was in there last week is still in there. Even though everyone knew it never got opened and it never got used, we had to pull it all out, confirm it's there, and put it back. It's just like, the boring stuff - yo... |
**Bert Hubert:** But interestingly -- it's a very interesting, good concept. I sometimes get that reaction when I tell people about unit tests, and regression tests. They say, "Well, look, the software worked the last time I used it, so it's still going to be working." And I'm "Well, just write some unit tests and see ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. That test suite becomes such an asset down the road. I was just updating our dependencies today, and just having test coverage where I could say "Okay, here's a dependency, run the tests, everything passed, updated to latest, run the test again, everything passed..." It just has a peace of mind ... |
**Bert Hubert:** No, and it's magical. PowerDNS was, of course, very old, and in 2001 we made the first regression tests and unit tests. And that was like an amazing feeling, that your tests discovered that you made a mistake and they told you before you shipped. I mean, it's still a good feeling. And I sometimes give ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's like, if you don't run your unit tests, then your customers will for you, to reapply the statement. |
**Bert Hubert:** That's the same kind of concept, yeah. |
**Break**: \[50:15\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Here's a question for you, Bert. How do you know how many dependencies is it too many dependencies? Is there a heuristic? Where do I know that I've just jumped the shark? |
**Bert Hubert:** I struggle with this myself... Because I do a lot of reinventing the wheel often, because I know that I could spend the time learning about your dependency, and then I would still be disappointed, because two years from now the dependency would be different again. So I do often spend more time than is ... |
I draw a very hard line at cryptography, for example. I mean, unless you are a famous cryptographer, you should not be doing cryptography. You should leave that to someone else. But even then, if you look at the state of many cryptographic libraries, OpenSSL has been a sort of disaster zone for years now. But I draw a ... |
But on the other hand, if someone asks me to be responsible for a piece of software - and it's an important piece of software; it's not a birthday calendar, it's something that people rely on. I need to know what is in there. I need to know what I'm shipping. And if I run a modern piece of software development, I end u... |
At one point, I was in a situation where we said "We have to audit this software." They're like "Okay." And then it turned out that if you would build the software three weeks apart, and you didn't change anything, it still would have changed, because by that time the dependencies had moved around, and shifted their ow... |
And so there are a lot of eyes on it. And it also doesn't change that much. And we all rely on the operating system, and lots of people are looking at that. |
So I'm sort of maybe on the low end of rebuilding my own wheels too often... But on the other hand, I still cannot understand shipping software where you say "Look, I honestly do not know what is in there, because it gets determined at build time what is in there." And maybe you could audit 300 dependencies if you woul... |
So yeah, I struggle with this, because when I tell people that I simply cannot believe that you run npm install get - I counted it, 5 million lines of code come out when you do that, for the most basic product. How can you ever know what is in those 5 million lines? But apparently -- I'm old, apparently, and it is now ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[56:11\] How do you know? |
**Bert Hubert:** Because it tells you so. There is this screen that says the copyright and the licenses and stuff, and it says, "Look, React is in there, and npm is in there..." And I hope it's not in the driving parts of the car. I hope this is just the radio, or something like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The entertainment sections of it, yeah. |
**Bert Hubert:** I hope that is the case. I hope that is the case. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, the tough thing about dependencies, even when you can audit, if you can and have audited and checked out the owners and the code, and the whole do your due diligence, is that what we're learning over the course of years and decades is even if you do that, if you're loading your dependencies from ... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, it is. And I come from a world where people also have to develop on networks with no internet connection. And it's just basically impossible for many people to function there anymore, because you try to do something and - yeah, there's no internet. There is no network. And the people that are in ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing I appreciate about this part of your post on dependencies was just the ways that you enumerated over what might happen over time with dependencies. I'm going to read ,them if you don't mind. You said just basically scrutinize and limit your dependencies, because all of them might over time... |
I think just enumerating those different things -- because you think, "Okay, obviously, the simple answer is just simple software. Limit your dependencies." But why? And that's the why of those, I think -- and it's not all the whys, but it's several versions of the why that might help you understand why you shouldn't. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. And these things all happen. So I've worked with an impossible Python project that just requires two different versions of the same dependency, and they cannot do it. And you also don't know how to recover from that. But on the other hand, it is of course sometimes great fun that someone just mov... |
\[01:00:02.05\] And I'm sort of this ascetic person that needs to be really -- yeah, I need to work really hard to display something that looks like a webpage, and someone else has no qualms at all about embedding an entire Electron copy. So it is always a bit of tension that says "Look, I'm telling you about these thi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this a recent change that happened, or is it something that's -- |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, it is. I think it's \[unintelligible 01:00:58.10\] from the past two weeks, or something like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Bert Hubert:** Which is why I tend to do almost everything with SQLite, because we know SQLite is going to be around forever. And we know the people that run it, and they're not going to do anything like that. They don't want to do anything like that... I mean, a hundred years from now people will be able to read SQL... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It kind of leans into some of the things you mentioned too down the line, which is more of a decision tree of sorts, which is how to scrutinize these dependencies. What does \[unintelligible 01:01:48.25\] Who else uses it? Who writes it? What are their goals? I'm kind of wondering if there's somethi... |
**Bert Hubert:** Actually, that would be good. Of course, we have these sort of SBOMs right now, the software bill of materials, but that is only like -- yeah, it's this piece of software, and it's that version... But it would indeed be very interesting to say "Look, this software is actually funded by this foundation,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Bert Hubert:** But I do want to share one other technique I use to figure out how my dependencies are doing, is I just use a dependency for a bit, in an isolated fashion... And I will always run into some kind of issue. There's always something. And then engage with the project. See what happens. So you go to the pro... |
So actually, trying something and then just opening a ticket and figuring out how do they respond? This is incredibly telling. But again, this requires work. This will require you a few hours, at least, per dependency to figure that out. And then people say "Look, I have a thousand dependencies. I won't have time to fi... |
**Jerod Santo:** If you select a dependency wisely, it can save you hundreds of hours of effort. So maybe one or two hours spent putting the work in is worthwhile, right? |
**Bert Hubert:** \[01:04:09.08\] I think it is. And there are things that -- I mean, like I said with cryptography... I mean, the cryptographers out there, they have done a better job than you would ever do. Or otherwise you would be a cryptographer. But I think it's somewhat of a lost art... I mean, I tell people -- y... |
**Jerod Santo:** Certainly. |
**Bert Hubert:** ...and someone removed that, or made it malicious, and then the whole tower of dependencies came falling down. And when I tell that these days to people, I say "Look, I worry about Leftpad." Then many people go like "What is Leftpad?" Although that should be part of our sort of engineering lore that sa... |
**Jerod Santo:** Are these youngsters you're talking to? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, well, relatively speaking. Relatively. |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Bert Hubert:** I mean, there are many people that are like 30, and I'm starting to find people at 30 to be a bit on the young side... But that's just me. |
**Jerod Santo:** There you go. It's all relative. |
**Bert Hubert:** It's all relative. But yeah, this is something -- I mean, this is just the way modern software gets developed. And of course, we have the die-hards that do embedded software, or really the safety of life stuff... But we are in a small minority, and the minority is getting smaller. |
**Jerod Santo:** There's also new tech coming out all the time... And you've been around long enough, 30 plus years in the business to know that not all that new tech is going to be additive, or useful, or last. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, so I did a talk on this for the Dutch networking community NLNOG, which is great... And the thing I tried to get across there was you have these new things coming along all the time. The new and shiny. And there are the people that are just always attracted to the new and shiny, and they have a g... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Bert Hubert:** You have to strike this balance to say "I enjoy the new and shiny, but not too much." And you should also let go at some point of Perl, or awk, or whatever. |
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