@Cursorkeys said in The latest npm security kerfuffle:
Are you really a developer if all you're doing is lego-ing together 10 tons of stuff other people have built?
All software development is fundamentally like this. I mean even if you code in Assembly, all you're doing is lego-ing together 10 tons of microcode snippets some other people have built.
When you build software (or anything really), you'll have to choose on which level of abstraction you want to work. If you choose a very low level of abstraction, you can do things very efficiently, but spend forever building them and thus won't get very far. If you choose a high level of abstraction, you may waste a lot of resources, but you can get very far very quickly, and so you might be able to build stuff which would have been entirely unimaginable at a lower level of abstraction.
I don't think that web dev is different in this than any other kind of development; it just happens at a very high level of abstraction and thus the "primitives" you'll use will get very specific and complex in themselves, which is what evokes the "lego" feeling.