Mike Thompson mikey-t

ES Modules are terrible, actually

This post was adapted from an earlier Twitter thread.

It's incredible how many collective developer hours have been wasted on pushing through the turd that is ES Modules (often mistakenly called "ES6 Modules"). Causing a big ecosystem divide and massive tooling support issues, for... well, no reason, really. There are no actual advantages to it. At all.

It looks shiny and new and some libraries use it in their documentation without any explanation, so people assume that it's the new thing that must be used. And then I end up having to explain to them why, unlike CommonJS, it doesn't actually work everywhere yet, and may never do so. For example, you can't import ESM modules from a CommonJS file! (Update: I've released a module that works around this issue.)

And then there's Rollup, which apparently requires ESM to be u

Software Development Philosophy and Rants

This is somewhere for me to rant about software development on the internet. I'm not necessarily good at always following my own advice, but what I say here is what I aspire to.

Best Practices

Must watch video by Ben Awad: Software Engineering "Best Practices".

Ben worded this really well, in my opinion:

You should not use the Open SSH client that comes with Git for Windows. Instead, Windows 10 has its own implementation of Open SSH that is integrated with the system. To achieve this:

Start the ssh-agent from Windows Services:

Type Services in the Start Menu or Win+R and then type services.msc to launch the Services window;
Find the OpenSSH Authentication Agent in the list and double click on it;
In the OpenSSH Authentication Agent Properties window that appears, choose Automatic from the Startup type: dropdown and click Start from Service status:. Make sure it now says Service status: Running.

Configure Git to use the Windows 10 implementation of OpenSSH by issuing the following command in Powershell:

git config --global core.sshCommand C:/Windows/System32/OpenSSH/ssh.exe