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So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s grea
by bartread 4mo ago
So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0].
However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago.
[0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questionable commercial decisions, working on the wrong thing, etc. But some at least is a legitimate result of evolving markets and needs.
- toast0 4mo agoSame same. I don't expect any of my product code to survive for very long. I suspect some of my open source contributions will live a long time. Not my personal projects that I make open source just in case, but the (very small) contributions to fix things in the dark shadows of established projects with longevity. Some of that will become obsolete and hopefully be removed, and some might get refactored eventually, but if the project is older than my career it's may well last beyond me.
- fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs 3mo agoOur work is extremely ephemeral by nature. Many times I only value the communication that happened and the shared understanding that was built. The code is an .. artifact. Nice to hang on the wall.