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I've had my talk, "When Your Codebase Is Nearly Old Enough To Vote", accepted at Linux Conf Australia in January. Every time I swear I'm going to start developing my talk earlier than "the week before the conference", and this year is no different ...
Description of the talk:
As time marches on, more and more FLOSS projects are reaching ages that qualify them as 'venerable'. On the one hand, that rich history of constant improvement provides a robust framework upon which to build. On the other hand, that can lead to sections of the code marked "here be dragons" that haven't been touched in this millennium, and the ever-accelerating speed of technology's march can leave you with a balance-sheet of technical debt that would make anyone quail.
This talk is a case study of Dreamwidth Studios, forked in 2008 from LiveJournal.com, a project that began in 1999. With a quarter-million lines of legacy Perl, it's been hard to decide what to modernize and what to leave alone. Come hear our successes, our failures, and a few horror stories of disasters we've stumbled into along the way.
With that in mind, are there any particular horror stories people think I should tell? I mean, I have a general outline in my head already, and I'm definitely going to be talking about things like "what happens when you invent something because you need it, then somebody else invents the same thing two years later and that's the version that takes off instead" (*cough* BML *cough*) and the like, but I'd like to tell some funny stories like "that time we wanted to make it possible for people with a default icon to select 'no icon' at the time they post, only to discover that the reason no icon displays when people haven't chosen a default icon was, in fact, due to a twelve-year-old bug" and stuff like that.
Description of the talk:
As time marches on, more and more FLOSS projects are reaching ages that qualify them as 'venerable'. On the one hand, that rich history of constant improvement provides a robust framework upon which to build. On the other hand, that can lead to sections of the code marked "here be dragons" that haven't been touched in this millennium, and the ever-accelerating speed of technology's march can leave you with a balance-sheet of technical debt that would make anyone quail.
This talk is a case study of Dreamwidth Studios, forked in 2008 from LiveJournal.com, a project that began in 1999. With a quarter-million lines of legacy Perl, it's been hard to decide what to modernize and what to leave alone. Come hear our successes, our failures, and a few horror stories of disasters we've stumbled into along the way.
With that in mind, are there any particular horror stories people think I should tell? I mean, I have a general outline in my head already, and I'm definitely going to be talking about things like "what happens when you invent something because you need it, then somebody else invents the same thing two years later and that's the version that takes off instead" (*cough* BML *cough*) and the like, but I'd like to tell some funny stories like "that time we wanted to make it possible for people with a default icon to select 'no icon' at the time they post, only to discover that the reason no icon displays when people haven't chosen a default icon was, in fact, due to a twelve-year-old bug" and stuff like that.
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Lemme see if I can think of any more obvious humorous ones too ;)