Poor Shoe
"So there's this developer who is the end-all, be-all try-hard of the year. We call him Shoe. He's the kind of over-engineering idiot that should never be allowed near code. And, to boot, he's super controlling."
Sometimes, you'll be talking to a friend, or reading a submission, and they'll launch into a story of some crappy thing that happened to them. You expect to sympathize. You expect to agree, to tell them how much the other guy sucks. But as the tale unfolds, something starts to feel amiss.
They start telling you about the guy's stand-up desk, how it makes him such a loser, such a nerd. And you laugh nervously, recalling the article you read just the other day about the health benefits of stand-up desks. But sure, they're pretty nerdy. Why not?
"But then, get this. So we gave Shoe the task to minify a bunch of JavaScript files, right?"
You start to feel relieved. Surely this is more fertile ground. There's a ton of bad ways to minify and concatenate files on the server-side, to save bandwidth on the way out. Is this a premature optimization story? A story of an idiot writing code that just doesn't work? An over-engineered monstrosity?
"So he fires up gulp.js and gets to work."
Probably over-engineered. Gulp.js lets you write arbitrary JavaScript to do your processing. It has the advantage of being the same language as the code being minified, so you don't have to switch contexts when reading it, but the disadvantage of being JavaScript and thus impossible to read.
"He asks how to concat JavaScript, and the room tells him the right answer: find javascripts/ -name '*.js' -exec cat {} \; > main.js"
Wait, what? You blink. Surely that's not how Gulp.js is meant to work. Just piping out to shell commands? But you've never used it. Maybe that's the right answer; you don't know. So you nod along, making a sympathetic noise.
"Of course, this moron can't just take the advice. Shoe has to understand how it works. So he starts googling on the Internet, and when he doesn't find a better answer, he starts writing a shell script he can commit to the repo for his 'jay es minifications.'"
That nagging feeling is growing stronger. But maybe the punchline is good. There's gotta be a payoff here, right?
"This guy, right? Get this: he discovers that most people install gulp via npm.js. So he starts shrieking, 'This is a dependency of mah script!' and adds node.js and npm installation to the shell script!"
Stronger and stronger the feeling grows, refusing to be shut out. You swallow nervously, looking for an excuse to flee the conversation.
"We told him, just put it in the damn readme and move on! Don't install anything on anyone else's machines! But he doesn't like this solution, either, so he finally just echoes out in the shell script, requires npm. Can you believe it? What a n00b!"
That's it? That's the punchline? That's why your friend has worked himself into a lather, foaming and frothing at the mouth? Try as you might to justify it, the facts are inescapable: your friend is TRWTF.
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