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Incompatibility is not a bug

Have you ever tried to get something to work, only to encounter some strange behaviour, cryptic error, or complete failure?

Then after investigating, you find out it’s not compatible. You were trying to run with the wrong version of something else. It half-worked but actually will never completely work.

This isn’t fun or a good use of time. It’s debugging, except there isn’t a fix unless you switch to the supported version, which is a configuration fix.

Clearly document what your dependency/app/project requirements are. Some languages/frameworks have tooling to support this (I’m thinking about package.json engines as an example). Use these features to speed up developer onboarding and minimize wasted time and effort.

- Karl

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