left-pad
loreprogrammingweb dev
The eleven-line npm package whose 2016 removal broke builds across the JavaScript world.
In March 2016, developer Azer Koculu unpublished his modules from npm after a naming dispute involving the registry and a company's trademark claim; among them was left-pad, eleven lines that padded strings, on which thousands of packages including Babel transitively depended. Builds failed globally within minutes, npm restored the package against its author's wishes, and un-unpublishing entered the vocabulary. The incident forced the ecosystem to confront dependency depth, registry governance, and how much of the modern web rested on one person's weekend function.