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I don’t find “dependency hell” to be a really a very meaningful term in of itself, I’ve seen it mean everything from the “left-pad” problem to an individual function which has too many dependencies.

So I take it as meaning “complexity”, and most of the time I think it’s one of those bullshit excuses we use to disable ourselves and give up.

Let me first be clear that I don’t intend to shame people or come from a place of more experience and look down on those that don’t have it. I’m saying this because I would kick my formal self if I could, but I can’t, so I’m kicking everyone else.

Everyone fears complexity because they think it’s too much for them to deal with. They give up just looking at it and turn off the part of our mind that breaks down problems. You need to recognize when you’re doing it and consciously stop yourself.

I believe that fear plays a bigger part in our ability to achieve things than any kind of technical ability. I often say to people: I don’t want to hire and work with the “smartest people”, I want to work with a group of people that gives each other confidence taking on bigger and bigger challenges.

I’m working closely with this other developer right now (sorry for calling you out buddy) who has a lot less experience than me creating open source tools and build systems stuff. Every now and then, I go on and on about all this things we should build and I cause them to panic about taking too much stuff on at once and not being able to hit deadlines.

Two things happen here:

1. Sometimes it’s a reality check for me to realize I’m going off on a tangent and not solving the immediate problem. This is actually a really good reason why you should surround yourself with people with different experiences and difference levels of experience.
2. Sometimes I have to stop and break down all the work we’re doing so they have a clear picture in their mind and kick that part of their brain that sees complexity and wants to panic.

Obviously you can make a lot of mistakes when designing your library/app/etc which tangle themselves throughout your codebase and make it near impossible to replace.

It might suck, but if you look it as hell and throw your hands up, you stop maintaining your codebase. Eventually it leads you to the natural conclusion “we should rewrite this from scratch” which is almost always bullshit (sometimes it’s not, but that’s a whole other question).

Yes, I have faced “complexity hell”. So will every other developer in the world (it’s really not just the JavaScript ecosystem as some tribal dumbasses will claim). But it doesn’t have to if you just break your problems down and stop fearing them.