Nearly passed based on title alone, was very glad I clicked in. Just the first paragraph alone sets up this excellent & useful neologism, Alien Artefacts: > Th

Nearly passed based on title alone, was very glad I clicked in. Just the first paragraph alone sets up this excellent & useful neologism, Alien Artefacts: > The purpose of this blog post is to introduce the concept of alien artefacts1, a subcategory of legacy code. I use the term to describe particularly complicated and important pieces of software written by very smart engineers that are no longer working for the company—and thus not available to support it. The software works really well for what it was designed to do, but it is highly resistant to change. We have some very wild search code that I think of that qualifies. I also recently added tests & typescript then slowly expanded some really neat code that takes Immutable.js, maps the entities, then caches the result in WeakMap to be re-resolvable latter- sounds simple but there was enough extra stuff also going on & happening that it took some putting heads together to decypher the true inner-workings. Both very distinct features which hadn't had the typical accrual of cruft, mostly untouched since inception, off in their own area. Alien Artefacts feels like a great term. (BTW what spelling is this? Same word as artifact or no?)