Ten years ago or so, I wrote lots of relatively small Windows applications. It was important to me to minimize dependencies on external libraries besides those available in Windows. I wanted to ship a single exe that anyone could drop on Windows 2000 or later and run it without installing anything else. To that end I wrote my code in C against the Win32 API directly. No MFC, no .NET, or anything else. If I could restrict my calls to functions in kernel32, user32, gdi32, and advapi32, all the better.

This weekend I've been working on a web application. While reflecting on my Win32 days, it struck me just how many dependencies I've taken to deliver this web application. Of course there's the baseline trio of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but then I'm also leveraging Node.js, Express, Jade, Passport, Socket.io, MongoDB, jQuery, and Knockout, plus a bunch of other small npm packages. Wow, what a change from my old "minimize dependencies" philosophy!