June 2025
Intermediate to advanced
152 pages
3h 15m
English
| Practice 1 | Cut Back on Unhealthy Dependencies |
It’s late 2024. I just created a new Phoenix project using mix phx.new my_project. It had 43 dependencies, which came in at 15 MB.
A new Rails project installs 83 gems, and these in turn load hundreds more. Here’s a dependency graph of a basic Rails app.

npx create-react-app my-app downloaded 874 modules (about 350 MB of code) for a basic React app. I had time to make a cup of tea.
I’m not claiming that React is bloated compared to the others. I’m saying that they all are carrying around a lot of baggage. And these are the numbers for baseline, empty projects. As you start adding code, you’ll be adding ...
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