a few thoughts from someone who makes a living designing and building stable-multi-year projects. 1. KISS, keep it simple, stupid. Keep your code as simple an

a few thoughts from someone who makes a living designing and building stable-multi-year projects. 1. KISS, keep it simple, stupid. Keep your code as simple and straight forward as possible. You can do that in a few ways: - As others have said, focus on keeping dependencies to a minimum. This can include libraries but also other 3rd party vendors/external apis. - try to keep feature creep out. the more complex the codebase the more likely it is to suffer failures. Keep things focused on solving specific problems. 2. Build software that is meant to be delegated. You can't remove all dependencies. Whether its libraries, external apis, or hosting, every piece of software needs something to run. If you don't want to be stuck as a lifetime maintainer, then you'll need to ensure your code can run without you. There are many ways to do this: - use existing, well tasted, stable technology that is supported and maintained by your org, not something new and fancy for each project. - enlist others to help early on, sys admins, hosting providers, or whomever. Build your software in a way that is supported by those providers.