4 ms·

Gives me a bit of a "ghost in the machine" feeling here. You created something interesting on a whim, gave it life, and sent it off into the world. Unbeknownst

Gives me a bit of a "ghost in the machine" feeling here. You created something interesting on a whim, gave it life, and sent it off into the world. Unbeknownst to you, it chugged on, somehow successfully urging people to use it. It did this mostly on its own. I'm sure there's a white paper or talk on the life developers give their software...

ryandetzel 14y ago
What keeps hitting me over and over is I created something very basic, very quickly for myself and now years later people actually rely on it to run their business. I felt so guilty getting that call...I felt as if I had let this women down even though I had never met her. The site was probably down for a couple of days...how many other people did I let down? How many people lost money or sleep because I failed them?
- scribu 14y ago
  I think you can walk away with a clean conscience if you offer an export mechanism.
- ericcholis 14y ago
  I can sympathize, I feel this way whenever something I've built for a large audience doesn't work. I feel as if I let them down. With that being said, perhaps you could make it easy for these users to let you know when it doesn't work. Set up multiple easy lines of communication (twitter, sms through google voice, email, etc..). Find a good, free, monitoring service. Based on what you told us in the article, this service has been cruising without issue for quite some time. That's better uptime than most projects ;-)
- ZoFreX 14y ago
  You might want to consider setting up some basic monitoring. If you don't have much time to put into this, you get one free watcher with Pingdom (no affiliation other than that they watch my website for me), and you'll get an email if the site goes down again.
- HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
  There is a lesson in this for many programmers. Cool features and complexity are not what's important. What is really important is that the user can do their job. What's trivial for a software developer can be life changing for a non-technical user.
dasil003 14y ago
Even though I've been programming for 20 years and it seems very mundane now, I am still regularly sometimes struck by the amazement when I'm reminded about how much code I still have out there running, and how much actual work it continues to get done despite the world changing around it and the now-obvious-to-me engineering deficiencies. Digital computers and software are truly an amazing achievement that transcend humanity's inherent ability to create systems.

ryandetzel 14y ago

What keeps hitting me over and over is I created something very basic, very quickly for myself and now years later people actually rely on it to run their business. I felt so guilty getting that call...I felt as if I had let this women down even though I had never met her. The site was probably down for a couple of days...how many other people did I let down? How many people lost money or sleep because I failed them?

scribu 14y ago
I think you can walk away with a clean conscience if you offer an export mechanism.
ericcholis 14y ago
I can sympathize, I feel this way whenever something I've built for a large audience doesn't work. I feel as if I let them down. With that being said, perhaps you could make it easy for these users to let you know when it doesn't work. Set up multiple easy lines of communication (twitter, sms through google voice, email, etc..). Find a good, free, monitoring service. Based on what you told us in the article, this service has been cruising without issue for quite some time. That's better uptime than most projects ;-)
ZoFreX 14y ago
You might want to consider setting up some basic monitoring. If you don't have much time to put into this, you get one free watcher with Pingdom (no affiliation other than that they watch my website for me), and you'll get an email if the site goes down again.
HeyLaughingBoy 14y ago
There is a lesson in this for many programmers. Cool features and complexity are not what's important. What is really important is that the user can do their job. What's trivial for a software developer can be life changing for a non-technical user.

dasil003 14y ago

Even though I've been programming for 20 years and it seems very mundane now, I am still regularly sometimes struck by the amazement when I'm reminded about how much code I still have out there running, and how much actual work it continues to get done despite the world changing around it and the now-obvious-to-me engineering deficiencies. Digital computers and software are truly an amazing achievement that transcend humanity's inherent ability to create systems.