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The dependencies thing is a killer. I remember a Windows developer co-worker insisting that everyone had the .NET runtime installed, and after shipping it turned out that most of our customers didn't have it installed, to which he finally said, "well, I always have it installed." (To be fair, I should have pressed him harder, and I did ask the question twice, but because I'd never built against the runtime I was unprepared for any challenge.)

Almost every new project I download starts with a sad, manual, and demoralizing installation of a bunch of third-party stuff that you have to google to find out what's missing. And it's not educational at all, because in a few years all these tools will now be obsolete.

(The best project I ever encountered was the Stripe CTF, which almost always used just one command to install a complete working copy of everything you needed and didn't have. I'm still impressed with that.)



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