Gems Are Overrated: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Copy-Pasting
About
When I started working with Ruby, I embraced its rich ecosystem. My Gemfile for any new project immediately grew longer than Gandalf's beard. Unfortunately, using Gems comes with downsides. On the practical side, pulling in third-party libraries exposes your app to supply-chain attacks that are increasingly common. However, what's even worse is that most Gems are pure bloatware. They add thousands of lines of code you'll never need, and churn constantly.
The alternative, obviously, is to build everything from scratch. In this talk, we'll look at some examples of how some well-known gems can be boiled down to a single file that you can copy-paste to any new project. We'll also look at the limits of this approach, and when you actually should reach for that Gem.
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