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Story of tech debt meltdown?
Week 148 Group Rant
AlmondSauce
7y

A certain, reasonably sized company had a large in house payment system to handle all their client purchases that was developed many, many years ago. All the devs that developed it had left, and as it "just worked" they hadn't seen fit to get anyone to update or maintain it since.

That was all fine until it suddenly (and completely) stopped working one sunny afternoon.

After paying a small fortune for one of the original devs to come back and look at it, turns out the payment API it was based on had been retired. Warnings of deprecation had been sent out 18 months prior, but they had just been ignored, as the secretary receiving them after the devs left had no idea what it meant.

rant

wk148
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Comments
  • 11
    7y
    "i don't understand what this text means, probably not important"

    users in a nutshell
  • 3
    7y
    @M1sf3t I am just gonna assume you typod 1976. Otherwise we're gonna have a talk.
  • 0
    7y
    @M1sf3t On top of that, the new devs added features that no one asked for, and that were inconsistent with the original architecture. While the original version was well documented, the custodians were illiterate and greedy tyrants.
  • 0
    7y
    @M1sf3t They knew they had made a system for a decent and literate society. As long as society remained decent and literate...well. Perhaps their flaw was in not acknowledging that no prosperous society had ever sustained decency for long. We had a good run. In fairness, even perfect founding documents, without fidelity to them, will result in the mess we have now. You know, like a Center of Excellence.
  • 0
    7y
    @M1sf3t oh. that took me a while. Nah, I am all good and up to speed on all that.

    I am a european, so I looked at other countries in good detail.
  • 0
    7y
    @M1sf3t

    The democratic college isn't aimed so much at the whole transfer of information in the 1700s issue as it is at the whole "we don't want a state with 51% of the country's population to decide elections for the entire country" issue.
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