Hi everyone,
Earlier this year I presented over at Webdevcon on Microstacks or megadependencies. The video was released yesterday, and I have now also turned that into a transcript with graphics and links to relevant content.
This is a meandering talk that reminds us of the risks of shipping unknown build time dependencies (as from npm), and also highlights how many services now have runtime third party service dependencies. These are very serious choices about the future of a project, and we can wonder how well we are making these choices.
Is anyone thinking about the long term costs and impact? The talk then covers “microstacks”, whereby a project relies in a minimal number of build dependencies, and no runtime service dependencies. Interspersed, there is discussion of what this means now that geopolitics has become so exciting, and that it can also be pretty hard to find people that can deliver services based on (virtual) servers & containers. The talk ends up describing one specific microstack based project, and recommends that people consider ‘mesostack’ deployments that have modest dependencies on third party dependencies and services.
The whole transcript, and link to video, can be found here.
Finally, I’m not a regular visitor at “web” conferences, but I can highly recommend Webdevcon, which is colocated with Appdevcon and the Dutch PHP Conference. They’ll be back in 2026 at March 10-13 in Amsterdam.
Cheers,
Bert