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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 15th, 2023

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  • I was born in 89, so remember a good portion of the 90s. It was a much simpler time but obviously we tend to romanticise the fun memories and quietly ignore how vastly more inconvenient daily life was.

    Mobile phones were not really a thing yet so getting in touch with your friends required a combination of patience and sheer luck.

    The internet was a different place entirely and was experienced in 30 minute chunks of time, just long enough to download a song or two before being kicked off for tying up the landline.

    Daily entertainment was 4, maybe 5 analogue TV channels, plus a collection of VHS tapes which are all degrading by being rewatched constantly.

    Every piece of life admin that you would normally do online today was instead done with pen and paper.

    Honestly, I’m amazed we ever got anything done.










  • I have witnessed companies make this exact mistake before - they have a legacy system written in $LanguageA that they either cannot find developers to maintain, believe is badly written, or does not support some new feature they want to implement (or some combination of the three) - and decide to solve this by taking the existing codebase and porting/transpiling it to $LanguageB (which is more modern, performant, is easy to hire developers for, etc) - without actually rewriting or rearchitecting anything.

    What they are actually doing is substituting one kind of tech debt for another. The existing code that was poorly written and/or not well understood is now just bad code written in a different language. Fixing bugs or implementing new features now takes just as long, if not longer to account for the idiosyncrasies of how the code was ported.

    And now this is being done by AI with even less oversight than usual? Recipe for a maintenance disaster.