Code Lasts Whether You Know It Or Not

When I first wrote the code to generate this site, and the 4 other times I've rewritten it before settling on the current implementation, I don't know if I thought I'd still be blogging, let alone still relying on that code over six years later. To its credit, the code still works well, the last time I touched it was to upgrade to Python 3 in 2016 to get full unicode support 🎉, and back in July to fix a bug with JSONFeed dates, but in 2018 it's definitely showing its age.

A pile of mostly undocumented bash and Python scripts and a bunch of fragile Python path hacks have allowed me to write these words and so many more over the past 6 years. To this day the site doesn't have a real archive page where posts are collected by year or month, it's just a giant, single page list of articles. Back when I wrote it, I didn't think I'd have enough posts to ever need that, or that if I did, I'd cross that bridge then. I didn't. I've swept it under the rug as a nice-to-have feature for years, and honestly if it became an issue, I'd probably just move to a real system like Jekyll or Wordpress; it'd be so much easier.

I'm reminded of something I saw on Twitter the other day:

An example of some old code that lives on

The code we write exists for as long as it's being used.


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