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Rushan S J
Rushan S J

Posted on • Updated on

Developer Profile Packages - Why and Why not

Maybe you've heard.... or maybe not ?

I just realized a thing.
You can make your profile as a package. And not just a package, a dev profile on pypi (pip) or npm. Virtually any package manager.

By making a cli app in python (pip), .NET (nuget) or node (npm), and globalizing it, you can make your app spit out information about you when its called.

Why

Well, its just a cool and creative way to show people your dev profile.

Why not

Some times, It just isn't cool. If you make a package with the name as a username that's related to a actual package, you're in trouble. For example, there is this package called pyplot in python but to install it, you would run pip install plot and not 'pip install pyplot'. Any new developer who wants to just download code and run would find it tough when the error says to install pyplot. Naturally, the developer would run pip install pyplot and then, you someone made a dev profile package called pyplot (might be their username?), the new dev would get further confused when the code doesn't work.

Workaround

You could perhaps name your package as profile-pyplot instead of pyplot which doesn't confuse people but some (bad?) developers would not listen to this and continue confusing people.

"With great power, comes great responsibility"
- A nice developer.

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