Sometimes, a user files a bug that, in the process of debugging it, teaches you some things you didn’t know about your own system. This is the story of one of those bugs.
npm has only been a company for 3 years, but it has been a code base for around 5–6 years. Much of it has been rewritten, but the cores of the [CLI](link to AGDubs’ download page?) and [registry products](link to features page) are still the original code. Having only worked at npm for a year at this point, there’s still a lot of things left for me to learn about how the whole system works.