- software practice
- development
- thoughts
My main project these days is a software project that has been in progress for 20 years. It is an art project with words and graphics.
It is unique in many ways, but the one that is the most challenging, and occasionally keeps me up at night, is the fact it is supposed to live for multiple human lifetimes. A challenge that is crazy to think about. Modern software is barely middle age. It is an every changing world, yet as we are thinking through how to build this, we need to always be thinking, when will someone need to touch this next.
When you are making decions for a client or employers systems, you probably consider stability, security, and support. Will the people running this in 5 years be able to pay someone to work on this? How often will we need to patch the system to stay ahead of vulnerabilies? How quickly can we get this software in place to start providing value? These all play into decision on what software you use, what language you write in, what the hosting requirement looks like.
When desiging this software, all of those things are under consideration. We need a stable platform, we need a