5 ms·

The one thing all long-lived systems have in common: nobody ever intended them to be long-lived systems.

• mitchty 7y ago
  There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
• jedberg 7y ago
  The quick and dirty Perl deployment system I built at reddit lasted nine years. Five years after I left. I definitely never intend it to last that long.
  • meddlepal 7y ago
    Even better is when a long-dead system is suddenly resurrected and repurposed for another project. I had a friend at a company I left tell me they were un-mothballing a cancelled platform (killed at the time by an unfortunate acquisition) and deployment system I built several years ago because it was needed again. The whole thing was pretty janky because it was barely past prototype but fairly functional. I wished him good luck and told him to find a new job, because there be dragons. He took the advice eventually, but I did hear they got it up and running again, with some pain. Apparently it is out there chugging along doing its thing once again.
  • smacktoward 7y ago
    My father wrote a dBase application forty years ago that, to his amazement, is still in use in some places today. Inertia is a hell of a force.
    • twhitmore 7y ago
      It probably has more digits for the primary key than the MS bug tracker originally mentioned. Sigh.
  • jnothing 7y ago
    so reddit used a perl script for deployment until 2017?