Which of the software you authored continued to be useful the longest? What do you think caused it to last longer than other software you've written?
Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#2Not so much code, but there was a shell script I wrote at a former company about a decade ago as a quick stop-gap to validate static file checksums in Akamai against a code deployment manifest and AFAIK it is still being used today and I don't even work there any more. It's just bash so it should be hopefully maybe super easy to fix when it breaks.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#3Not so much code, but there was a shell script I wrote at a former company about a decade ago as a quick stop-gap to validate static file checksums in Akamai against a code deployment manifest and AFAIK it is still being used today and I don't even work there any more. It's just bash so it should be hopefully maybe super easy to fix when it breaks.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have a similar answer! I suspect my longest lasting code is either a quick and dirty shell script or a throw away prototype that ended up in production. I wonder how often the code we obsess over for quality persists versus, say, the code we build in response to a timely, but perhaps less high profile, business need. I'm curious what actually drives longevity.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#4It's not the longest running software in the world but hey... in 2013 I have written some software for one of the world largest tubelines. It took me around 2 months (and even that was causing pesky manager to moarn I overengineered the thing). It was written in C++ and I never had a chance to properly test it since operations started around year later and I left soon after, but my colleagues told me recently it's running well and staff rely on this quite heavily ;)
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#5I've got 10 year old code still running because the SaaS product I built back in 2013 is still running. I don't think it will be in 5 years, and that feels about right in terms of lifetime of code. If you write a successful product, the need for it should keep the code alive until tech advances so far past your original stack that what was once new and innovative is old and legacy... and then the product is either sunset or re-platformed. So if your code lives anywhere in the 10-20 year range, that is not too shabby.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#6Probably code for the servers of a big-ish commercial online game. I haven't logged on and played that game myself for like a decade.
Next up would be random ETL scheduled processes in back-offices.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#7The first project I worked on as a solo backend dev is still in production. God knows how we won that tender. I was a 20-year-old clueless university dropout that definitely shouldn’t have been trusted, working for a boutique agency operating out of a converted barn out the back of some house.
It is a scheduling system for a department at a major public hospital in the area.
It’s still one of the projects I’m happiest with. Despite subsequent developers making a bit of a mess of it, it is a nice piece of software. And, compared to the rest of the stuff in health system, is it a shining beacon of hope for generations to come.
As I’ve progressed and started working for some bigger companies, I’m incredibly impressed by what we all, myself included, did with so little.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#8I guess some monitoring scripts, which count as code, that have been running for 10+years.
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#9As an intern at a social services department circa 1997, I wrote some COBOL code that improved the way that a certain calculation was made and eliminated a bunch of processes. (It was calculated with about 20 steps due to people just pasting random crap on top of random crap over 25 years)
I ran into my old boss, who was a family friend, and he told the story that they used that as an example to improve other stuff, and that had saved a few million bucks over the years (iirc they paid for CPU cycles). It was still running as of 2020!
Re: Ask HN: What is your longest lasting code?
#10I wrote Half-Life 2: Sandbox, which was the first implementation of LuaJIT in the Source Engine. Planimeter beat Team Garry by years because Garry Newman modified his implementation of Lua for Garry's Mod.
The examples of how to properly integrate Lua into a larger commercial engine have been reused by my team for over a decade and used by larger teams who are on Steam as well as hobbyists.
We wrote a game engine called Planimeter Game Engine 2D that's also over a decade old which has tons of reference code that's easily accessible for game engine engineers and game developers that has advanced concepts like high tolerance client-side prediction down to dial-up connections and a UI compositor with CSS 2.1 features.
My software firm Andrew McWatters and Co., has an internal codebase called myapp which is also many years old and serves as a base for delivering web services to clients leaning on experiences from dozens from businesses including some in finance and healthcare to deliver solutions compliant with federal standards.
Good software lasts longer than bad software because it's useful, and doesn't chase trends, it defines them or stands apart in ways no one else's software does.