The story of how 28-year-old Azer Koçulu briefly broke the internet shows how writing software for the web has become dependent on a patchwork of

How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code

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2021-07-21 17:30:06

The story of how 28-year-old Azer Koçulu briefly broke the internet shows how writing software for the web has become dependent on a patchwork of code that itself relies on the benevolence of fellow programmers. When that system breaks down, as it did last week, the consequences can be vast and unpredictable.

Koçulu had been publishing code he wrote to npm, a popular service that’s widely used to find and install open-source software written in JavaScript. It has become an essential tool in web development, invoked billions of times a month, thanks to npm’s ease of use and its enormous library of free code packages contributed by the open-source community.

The open-source philosophy is what drove Koçulu to contribute to npm in the first place, and why he ended up abandoning the service. Like many in the broad community of people who write code that anyone can use, he is influenced by the “hacker ethic” of early programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a set of more concrete values that were later put forth by the programmer Richard Stallman.

“The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs,” Stallman wrote in his 1985 manifesto. He railed against “the commercialization of system software,” and laid out ways to make code more communal and widely useful. Many of Stallman’s ideas, as well as the legacy of the hacker ethic, continue to influence programmers like Koçulu.

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