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Dependencies in JavaScript are pretty straightforward. I can’t write library.doThing() unless library exists. If library changes in some fundamental way, things break and hopefully our tests catch it.

Dependencies in CSS can be a bit more abstract. Robin just wrote in our newsletter how the styling from certain classes (e.g. position: absolute) can depend on the styling from other classes (e.g. position: relative) and how that can be — at best — obtuse sometimes.

Design has dependencies too, especially in design systems. Nathan Curtis:

You release icon first, and then other components that depend on it later. Then, icon adds minor features or suffers a breaking change. If you update icon, you can’t stop there. You must ripple that change through all of icon’s dependent in the library too.

“If we upgrade and break a component, we have to go through and fix all the dependent components.”?—?Jony Cheung, Software Engineering Manager, Atlassian’s Atlaskit

The biggest changes happen with the smallest components.

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