I’ve been struggling with something for a while now and ironically a sitcom from the 80’s finally helped me pinpoint the problem. My TV was on for background noise and I noticed that it was an episode of Family Ties. In the episode, Elyse Keaton was having a problem. A prominent building that she designed was being torn down and replaced by a cookie cutter mini-mall. She was struggling with her “legacy” - her mark on the world - disappearing. After the building was gone, what evidence would there be that Elyse Keaton was there?
I’m facing a similar issue. I don’t like getting into my day job too much online (for various reasons), but suffice it to say that applications that I developed for decades are being sunset/replaced. I’ve developed quite a lot over the decades, but eventually it would all be replaced. Once it is, what will I have as “proof that TechyDad was here”?
How do you handle the existential crisis of our works being digital and transient versus having an actual, physical product?
Everything you code is disposable. Get at peace with that fact and you will be happy. It was crappy code anyway.
How do you handle the existential crisis of our works being digital and transient versus having an actual, physical product?
Honestly, I’ve already gone through this when I realized that a lot of the software I wrote in the 90s is gone forever. Luckily, textfiles archived some of it (both binaries and source), but I really wish I open sourced more of my personal projects back in the day.
That said, I think video games have a longer shelf life than any other software… people will always want to play old games. As long as that’s the case, at least my name will continue on in the ScummVM source.
I am not remembered for the technology I put in place, the tickets I close or the outages I help remediate.
But when I left a job I’d been at for 5 years, I found again that I am remembered for how I make people feel when I interact with them. Just by being myself, I’d been kind to a lot of people who really needed to hear kindness, and I helped a lot of people get started when they were struggling.
What I do in the digital realm will disappear decades before those people forget who I am.
Everything we build is on the shoulders of what came before. Your contribution now creates a world that makes other people’s work possible in the future. While the literal artifacts you produce will not be there for long, for the time they existed they provide a small piece of the platform upon which the next generation will be created. Like sand eventually forming rock.
This is not a direct answer, but I think you have the beginnings of a useful perspective in that episode of “Family Ties”. Namely, it is not a problem arising from the ephemeral nature of software, but the nature of time and change.
