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0 pointsTranquilMarmot3y ago0 comments

> As long as nothing changes, and you don't run out of disk space (from logs for example), things stay working pretty much just fine. > ... > There are other things that can bring a site down, like security issues, or bugs triggered by unusual states, too much traffic, etc. But generally speaking those things are rare and don't bring down an entire site.

Aren't these changes inevitable, though? There is no such thing as bug free code.

Another thing that forces consistent code changes is compliance reasons- any time a 0-day is discovered or some library we're using comes out with a critical fix, we would have to go update things that hadn't been touched sometimes in years.

At my last job, I spent a significant amount of time just re-learning how to update and deploy services that somebody who left the company years ago wrote, usually with little-to-no documentation. And yes, things broke when we would deploy the service anew, but we were beholden to government agencies to make the changes or else lose our certifications to do business with them.

Eventually, Twitter will have to push code changes, if only to patch security vulnerabilities. Just waiting for another Heartbleed to come around...

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smaudet3y ago

Software never goes stale, it's the environment around it which stales.

Something from the 70s works perfectly fine, except it can't run on anything bare any longer, and the hard drives etc. have all long since failed or their PSU capacitors have blown....so Twitter will absolutely rot, how fast depends on several factors.

I personally suspect the infrastructure used to build Twitter will rot faster than Twitter itself, and of course the largest most dramatic source of rot is the power required to run it - several large communities have abandoned it already, making it less much less relevant, meaning the funding for it will also dry up, meaning more wasted cpu cycles and the like.

Thats of course assuming its left in some sort of limbo, it doesnt sound like thats the case with the current management, its only a matter of time before it topples over from shitty low-rate contractor code. Honestly, the app worked like so much hot garbage already, I could see it falling over itself and imploding with a couple poorly placed loops...

kenjackson3y ago

This assumes security doesn’t matter. You can’t run on stale code and be secure for too long, at least for anything non trivial. I imagine even if Twitter doesn’t add any functionality at so, it will still take hundreds of patches per Yasser.

TranquilMarmotOP3y ago

Something from the 70's was not connected to the internet where millions of people are using it every day and finding every single edge case, or they are trying to break into it to steal valuable data. It was definitely not beholden to the same government regulations as a social media site running in the 21st century.

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