Flutterby™! : Data Hell

I was recently involved in a discussion, stemming from my whine about Ubuntu renaming libgeographic-dev to libgeographiclib-dev, about the value of code, about building assets, and about operations vs capital improvement.

We in software kind of casually say that every line of code is a liability. And it's true. We say that the value of software is in how little it costs to change it, and this is a little less true, because a working system has value, and, yes, changing it costs and agility has value, but...

I'm not sure what my thesis is, but when we build external dependencies, we're making it so that we must, randomly, spend on changing our software, on updating, and the constant churn means that we don't have value for craft.

Why should I bother to build it beautifully if it's gonna get torn down in 6 months? Why should I build it for a decade, or a month, if I'm going to have to gut it and rebuild it in two weeks?

As someone drawn to the startup world, I have struggled with this often, on the other hand the code running this website has legacy that runs back two and a half decades, and a good portion of it has been running largely unchanged for two.

And it pisses me off when an apt upgrade, even across releases, breaks shit.

Which is why I recommend today's rant: Get me out of data hell:

Suffice it to say that while people are sincerely trying their best, our leaders are not even remotely equipped to handle the volume of people just outright lying to them about IT.