home garden / legacy tech and maintenance

• maintenance often seems to be an afterthought but the majority of a software’s lifecycle it will need to be maintained. give maintenance the respect it deserves!

https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last

• early in the COVID-19 pandemic, an older programming language called COBOL came under fire for supposedly busting up several states’ worth of unemployment queues. many COBOL programmers had retired and weren’t there to kill bugs when the masses rightfully took advantage of expanded unemeployment.
• as the article above lays out, COBOL hadn’t really been the problem at all in many cases. In at least one case, the consumer facing website was causing the error. JavaScript being the cuplrit, no less. much of the actual COBOL issues were due to poor maintenance and rooted in the lack of respect for COBOL. many programmers see its simple syntax and commands unworthy of their big serious programmer brains and don’t take the time to learn it though it powers finance departments and banks across the world.

https://nostarch.com/kill-it-fire

• a practical guide to successfully maintaining software systems and eventually replacing them. i think this may have been a Hacker News find?

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/69788/what-is-the-history-of-the-use-of-foo-and-bar-in-source-code-examples

• this is just hilarious