Smallblog

npm author Isaac Schlueter, on why npm succeeded:

You really don’t need to get a bunch of smart folks together to identify a path forward. You need one person, who is of at least average intelligence and preferably below-average cleverness, with a strong will to succeed, and a dedication to the space that they’re in.

Not to toot my own horn here, but npm didn’t work out like it has because I did such a great job coding it. It’s worked out well because I cared enough to keep slogging away at it long after it stopped being fun. There were cuter node package managers when npm was new, but their owners lacked the will to bootstrap their communities, or deal with the nonstop stream of bugs that come their way. The only real “innovation” in npm was that I tried as hard as possible to minimize boilerplate, overhead, ceremony, curation, and other “not getting shit done” aspects of module development. But npm wasn’t the first package manager to have that insight (I stole it from yinst), and the module system and package.json format were developed mostly by other people. I just kept working on it.

And

What the [front-end] world needs is not a decision, or a committee of smart folks, but a leader who’s willing to do a lot of tedious work for a long time.

That person has to be willing to take on the responsibility of packaging popular modules until there is enough momentum that others want to be included.