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Yeah, I don't get it. People put all this time and effort into something and then murder it, and post their "self-fulfilling victimhood apology letter" "why we

Yeah, I don't get it. People put all this time and effort into something and then murder it, and post their "self-fulfilling victimhood apology letter" "why we shutdown and left our customers twisting in the wind." Build something that doesn't cost much to keep going and let it simmer at least 5x longer than you think. And, make copyright dates self-updating. ;) Furthermore, if it's not losing copious amounts of money, pivot, restructure it or sell it to somebody else. Shutting down usually == disrespecting money. Or they become slightly successful and abandon it, like they have self-harm tendencies.

3pt14159 8y ago
Sometimes the problem is that it takes 10 years for the thing to finally start generating real money, but by this point everyone involved has moved on and you have customers that you don't want to let down, but really the thing is Rails 3 and the $100k of profit per year it is bringing in aren't really worth the headache of upgrading everything. I think in the next 5 years someone is going to invent an entire stack for long-lived apps. Where every level is as simple as possible and the only updates that are issued are security updates. We need computers to be able to run 30 year old software without having to stress, and the only way I can think of doing that is to minimize feature development and complexity.
- jakelazaroff 8y ago
  Why is Rails not a stack for long-lived apps? Or "JAM", MEAN, LAMP, .NET or any of the other popular technologies people have chosen over the past quarter century? Sure, it might be harder to find someone willing to write PHP now than it was in 1998, but that's how things work when new technologies are constantly being invented. With few exceptions, browsers and servers support the same things they did when the web began. Your old server-rendered Perl app might look a bit long in the tooth in 2018, but there's no reason you can't run it exactly the way you describe.
  - x0x0 8y ago
    I think gp is referring to the ongoing effort to keep an app up, running, and secure; not any feature of the platform. You can of course buy Rails LTS (though from a quick glance the pricing can be very expensive if you have eg a deploy per tenant rather than multitenant). But gems move on from your version, apis change underneath you, etc. Keeping a moderately complex rails using say 100 gems with okta + google SSO and various other integrations up and running on a permanent basis can easily consume 1/2 a ft engineer. So if you're in possession of an app that earns say $150k/year, you have to decide if you want to put that half eng year in or if there are more productive ways to spend your time. This is even more painful if you bet on, for example, a javascript framework that fell out of fashion.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      Remember maintenance doesn’t need a high dollar engineer. $30/hr or less guys can do that.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  IME customer requirements change often, even if only because of fads. Interoperating with ever changing third parties is another complication.
- jpindar 8y ago
  Wow. I can't imagine any (legal and moral) thing I wouldn't do for $100K. Well, maybe working for a really toxic boss, but we're talking about self-employment here.
- kennu 8y ago
  Serverless on AWS is the closest thing to an “eternal” stack. Utilize only managed, auto scaling, self updating services, and your app will keep running for a long time. Occasionally the Node.js major version in Lambda gets deprecated, but even so I think old deployments still keep running.

3pt14159 8y ago

Sometimes the problem is that it takes 10 years for the thing to finally start generating real money, but by this point everyone involved has moved on and you have customers that you don't want to let down, but really the thing is Rails 3 and the $100k of profit per year it is bringing in aren't really worth the headache of upgrading everything. I think in the next 5 years someone is going to invent an entire stack for long-lived apps. Where every level is as simple as possible and the only updates that are issued are security updates. We need computers to be able to run 30 year old software without having to stress, and the only way I can think of doing that is to minimize feature development and complexity.

jakelazaroff 8y ago
Why is Rails not a stack for long-lived apps? Or "JAM", MEAN, LAMP, .NET or any of the other popular technologies people have chosen over the past quarter century? Sure, it might be harder to find someone willing to write PHP now than it was in 1998, but that's how things work when new technologies are constantly being invented. With few exceptions, browsers and servers support the same things they did when the web began. Your old server-rendered Perl app might look a bit long in the tooth in 2018, but there's no reason you can't run it exactly the way you describe.
- x0x0 8y ago
  I think gp is referring to the ongoing effort to keep an app up, running, and secure; not any feature of the platform. You can of course buy Rails LTS (though from a quick glance the pricing can be very expensive if you have eg a deploy per tenant rather than multitenant). But gems move on from your version, apis change underneath you, etc. Keeping a moderately complex rails using say 100 gems with okta + google SSO and various other integrations up and running on a permanent basis can easily consume 1/2 a ft engineer. So if you're in possession of an app that earns say $150k/year, you have to decide if you want to put that half eng year in or if there are more productive ways to spend your time. This is even more painful if you bet on, for example, a javascript framework that fell out of fashion.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    Remember maintenance doesn’t need a high dollar engineer. $30/hr or less guys can do that.
paulryanrogers 8y ago
IME customer requirements change often, even if only because of fads. Interoperating with ever changing third parties is another complication.
jpindar 8y ago
Wow. I can't imagine any (legal and moral) thing I wouldn't do for $100K. Well, maybe working for a really toxic boss, but we're talking about self-employment here.
kennu 8y ago
Serverless on AWS is the closest thing to an “eternal” stack. Utilize only managed, auto scaling, self updating services, and your app will keep running for a long time. Occasionally the Node.js major version in Lambda gets deprecated, but even so I think old deployments still keep running.