Managing dependencies

Hi there, Sunny Srivastava ! As Andrew points out in the video, we as developers sometimes need tools to help us develop our app that are not exactly critical to our app being able to run/execute. He uses the example of testing suites. These are used when we (the developers) are testing our code. But those tests don't need to be in our production app. The end user (who may know nothing at all about programming) definitely doesn't need to know exactly how we're testing our app.

Here's a fairly concrete example and a pretty simple one. I use VSCode when programming. There are lots of files and extensions that you can get to help you code. I use one for ES linting. This helps me detect potential problems with my code and even spacing/indentation inconsistencies so that my code has consistent styling. But the style of my code is of zero importance to end users. In fact, my JS is all likely to be minimized to reduce whitespace by the time the end user gets it. Therefore, I really don't need the configuration file for that linting module in there as a dependency for the end product. I only need it for my personal use. It is a "dev" dependency. One that is used by the developer, but not by the end user.

Hope that clarifies things!