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Discussion on: What skills do career indie developers not learn (vs those employed mostly on teams)

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Ben Halpern

I was just perusing some code from my brother's project. He is a very effective self-taught developer, but it is interesting to see what falls by the wayside in that environment.... And what jumps out to me is... Dependency management.

His projects have a lot of non-updated dependencies, which I feel is one of those things which you'd do based on the culture of a team and not something you'd just "learn" independently.

I know he does update his dependencies from time to time, but not on a regular basis. I know some teams probably have bad cultures around this as well, but I know personally my values around updating dependencies are influenced by the habits of the software teams I've been on.

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Corey McCarty

Fortunately there are tools like Dependabot that can help with this on smaller projects if you just enable them.

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Jon Randy πŸŽ–οΈ

Most of my personal projects have zero dependencies. Being self taught from an early age on a ZX Spectrum instilled a mindset of wanting to understand and build as much of every project as I (reasonably) can

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Elliot Lee

I've seen plenty of university-trained software engineers leave dependencies non-updated from time to time, myself included. It's a risk-reward and "Is it worth the time?" trade-off, and often the answer is "No it's not worth the time"