💸 The cost of updating dependencies, or not

As developers, we are often lazy when it comes to updating dependencies.

A short-term productivity hack is to not update them.

Leave our Yocto build at an old version.

Never touch go.mod or package.json – everything is working and I can keep focusing on coding features.

Don’t update our tools – we don’t have time.

… until things break, there is a security problem in a dependency, or we need a feature in a new version of something, etc.

And then things grind to a halt.

As Khem recently shared, Maintenance is costlier than development, so even though development is important today, maintenance is more important – for tomorrow.

Part of YOUR Platform should be selecting technologies that can be updated regularly with little pain, and a process to do this.

It is the question of paying a little bit continuously, or a lot all at once later, and the latter is often so painful that in many cases it is impractical.

Investing in YOUR Platforming compounds positive gains – neglecting technical debt compounds negative gains.