3 ms·

I love this. It has crossed my mind more than once to do something similar at some point in the future. This is a bit like receiving an inheritance from your g

I love this. It has crossed my mind more than once to do something similar at some point in the future. This is a bit like receiving an inheritance from your grandparents. There will be true gems and novelties mixed in with a lot of knick knacks and rubbish. But the totality of that tells a story of real people living rich and interesting lives that only a handful of highlights would not do justice to.

albertzeyer 3y ago
Why only when you are retired? Why not just right now?
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  depending on how organized you are... this can take a lot of time
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    I can definitely relate to this feeling of "when $this is all over, I'll open source a bunch of it, but it's too much work to factor it out now," where $this is more often a company or project than a career. Sadly, it almost never happens. It just goes to show the importance of open sourcing what you can, as you can (in other words, "now or never"). But it's a lot more work to do that than people imagine, even when they say "well just release it in the least polished form possible." You've still gotta deal with adding a new boundary to your codebase, which not only requires additional effort but also increases complexity of the wider project and makes it impossible to refactor without first refactoring a cascade of miniprojects you've created within it.
    - josephg 3y ago
      I often think of source code like moulding clay. While you’re actively working in a codebase, the clay is moist and malleable. Making changes is easy, because the context of what it does, and how it’s organised is fresh in your mind. But if you move on to another project and let time pass, the clay dries out and becomes brittle. When you open the project up again, it takes time to “wet the clay” - and remember all that context that you’ve forgotten. It’s easy to add bugs, or reimplement methods that already exist somewhere else under a different name. But over time, you work water into the clay and it becomes malleable again. I agree with your comment. Refactoring software to split out libraries that you can opensource is a lot of work. More work than people realise. But if you think refactoring is a lot of work when the clay is wet, it’ll be many times harder if you let the clay dry first. Refactoring as you work is always the best way, because it’s often the only way to get it done.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
coldcode 3y ago
I wish I had saved something from my 40 years of programming, but I alwayds left everything behind when I moved to a new job. I did manage to keep my commercial memory allocator from the late 90's (single threaded, only supported Metrowerks CodeWarrior and the old MacOS), it was the fastest allocator on the Mac, and bug-free, but became obsolete with MacOS X. Not sure anyone would care today. I lost my source code to Trapeze as I mentioned yesterday ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze_(spreadsheet_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze_(spreadsheet_program) ). I guess I never throught about saving most of my work for a day when no one cared if I shared it.
- snvzz 3y ago
  >Not sure anyone would care today. There's a vibrant retrocomputing community.

albertzeyer 3y ago

Why only when you are retired? Why not just right now?

micromacrofoot 3y ago
depending on how organized you are... this can take a lot of time
- chatmasta 3y ago
  I can definitely relate to this feeling of "when $this is all over, I'll open source a bunch of it, but it's too much work to factor it out now," where $this is more often a company or project than a career. Sadly, it almost never happens. It just goes to show the importance of open sourcing what you can, as you can (in other words, "now or never"). But it's a lot more work to do that than people imagine, even when they say "well just release it in the least polished form possible." You've still gotta deal with adding a new boundary to your codebase, which not only requires additional effort but also increases complexity of the wider project and makes it impossible to refactor without first refactoring a cascade of miniprojects you've created within it.
  - josephg 3y ago
    I often think of source code like moulding clay. While you’re actively working in a codebase, the clay is moist and malleable. Making changes is easy, because the context of what it does, and how it’s organised is fresh in your mind. But if you move on to another project and let time pass, the clay dries out and becomes brittle. When you open the project up again, it takes time to “wet the clay” - and remember all that context that you’ve forgotten. It’s easy to add bugs, or reimplement methods that already exist somewhere else under a different name. But over time, you work water into the clay and it becomes malleable again. I agree with your comment. Refactoring software to split out libraries that you can opensource is a lot of work. More work than people realise. But if you think refactoring is a lot of work when the clay is wet, it’ll be many times harder if you let the clay dry first. Refactoring as you work is always the best way, because it’s often the only way to get it done.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

coldcode 3y ago

I wish I had saved something from my 40 years of programming, but I alwayds left everything behind when I moved to a new job. I did manage to keep my commercial memory allocator from the late 90's (single threaded, only supported Metrowerks CodeWarrior and the old MacOS), it was the fastest allocator on the Mac, and bug-free, but became obsolete with MacOS X. Not sure anyone would care today. I lost my source code to Trapeze as I mentioned yesterday ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze_(spreadsheet_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapeze_(spreadsheet_program) ). I guess I never throught about saving most of my work for a day when no one cared if I shared it.

snvzz 3y ago
>Not sure anyone would care today. There's a vibrant retrocomputing community.