Laurie Voss Helps Millions of Programmers

Published: April 25, 2017, 4:01 a.m.

Managing the world’s largest software registry: this week Paul and Rich talk to Laurie Voss, chief operating officer of npm, the JavaScript package manager that gives 7 million programmers worldwide access to hundreds of thousands of packages. They discuss how npm works and the details of its past, present, and future—as well as how removing one tiny piece from it can break the entire internet. They also discuss managing a large community of users, where the 0.1%’s complaints always seem to outweigh the 99.9%’s praise.