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My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

blog.visionarycto.com

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Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#181

Post by mchaver »

MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

It isn't necessarily software, but algorithms will likely last a long time. Euclid's algorithm and the sieve of Eratosthenes are still around. Researchers are still developing new ones. Just like building techniques may outlive the buildings that were created in their shadows.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#182

Post by hermitcrab »

"In the long run. we are all dead". But I find it hard not to look at software and think how ephemeral it all is. All those late nights and all that debugging and it has mostly disappeared without a trace within 10-20 years. And that is the stuff that even got used at all. :0(

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#183

Post by hef19898 »

riffraff wrote: post #93
asdfman123 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so weird, I used to be much more of STEM triumphalist, the kind of person who used to think the past was evil and the future can’t come fast enough. I wouldn’t consider myself conservative by any means but increasingly in 30s I’m beginning to think everyone needs to stop messing with stuff and accept imperfection.

As the adage goes, things that are new when you're a kid are the norm, things that are new when you're a young person are exciting, things that are new when you're older are unnecessary, confusing, or scary. It's true for everyone in every subject I'm afraid:)

Even when young, new stuff is scary. Look at any community, ranging from RPGs (new rule editions, new meta plots (those are in the example I think of getting worse, objectively ;-)) to stuff like World of Warships (new classes and ships introduced after person started bad). Nothing to do with age, but rather emotional attachment. I try to avoid that kind of attachmemt, especially with regarda to my work. The odd time I stumble across something I didnyeaes ago more often than not I embarassed to thebpoint wantin to deprecate it myself! The rare, even odder, exception notwithstanding.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#184

Post by mchaver »

hedora wrote: post #5

The fun thing is that, until CS slows down, stuff gets better so fast that we get to reimplement the same thing, but 10x better every 5 years or so. First I wrote single threaded code code with automatic memory management, then single threaded synchronous with manual memory management, then synchronous multi-threaded, then async, and then async lock free. Now I am writing async lock free, and the compiler is helping…

Unfortunately users are not seeing 10x better performance with the average application. A bit of the curse of more resources leads to using more resources wastefully.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#185

Post by ascar »

This might ring true for most jobs and especially for anything business related. If you go lower on the library, tooling or infrastructure side things tend to live on much longer, especially if it's simple but necessary functionality. Code doesn't automatically become technical dept just because it becomes older.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#186

Post by robertlagrant »

It's harder now. Way back when you could write ls and it would basically be a "done" piece of software to be distributed everywhere. More recently the big standards are enormous projects involving thousands of people, such as Docker or Kubernetes, that seem to have fairly unbounded feature lists.

One exception: I think the jq tool could stay viable, if it made it into a standard toolset. It solves a defined problem.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#187

Post by Sai_ »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #153

> My entire career is now technical debt, or the code has been deprecated. My fellow dev often laugh when I tell them that instead of looking at all the long dead techs that are not useful to me anymore, my way to feel good is to look back at all the long dead techs that I didn't bother to learn . And, geez, is the graveyard huge. > Java Applets were also a big thing once upon a time. They were slow, and having the c…

Even more than Java Applets, I remember looking at Java Beans and being heavily, mightily underwhelmed.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#188

Post by tzfld »

tuchsen wrote: post #36
MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

People are commenting core OS libraries and kernels, but the Space Jam movie website from 96 is still up. I bet the guy that wrote that didn't think it'd be around nearly 20 years later, I hope it never goes down. https://www.spacejam.com/1996/jam.html

That's until there is someone to keep it up. Will disappear the moment the domain isn't renewed.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#189

Post by dsign »

lambdaloop wrote: post #83
ThePhysicist wrote: post #73

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace. In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often…

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2730/

Plot twist: biological evolution works like that too.

Re: My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated

#190

Post by _glass »

MartinMcGirk wrote: post #18

I feel like this is heavily connected with the idea of legacy. I grew up in Scotland, and lots of the buildings, culture, etc, have been around for hundreds of years. It would be nice to feel like something I was building would last as long and outlive me. It doesn’t though. Sometimes I think that this is just the nature of software development. Most of the stuff I build is built to solve an immediate business proble…

But the thing is, that the ghost of the code lives on. Many times I saw specific database designs, and technical decisions all taken to accommodate a solution that didn't exist for a decade or so.
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