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What makes your life well-lived? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 9 months ago by investorsexchange@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?

Put another way, if you have an extra hour tomorrow with nothing planned, what could you do with yourself to later say: I’m glad I did that? What if you have an unplanned day? Or a week? Does how you use that time change? Would the choice of how to use that time be more or less deliberate, depending on how long you have? Does that choice define you as a person?

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[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Definitely a worthwhile thing to do, but software is so ephemeral that it's hard to say "lasting." If I died tomorrow, all my projects would likely be irrelevant and forgotten within a few years. Though some projects have stronger lasting power than others. Now I'm curious what the oldest line of code in the FreeBSD kernel is.

Sorry, not trying to be negative on your accomplishments. Just been thinking about this lately.

[–] Hazzia@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

How to make lasting contributions that will stand the test of time:

Create a new project from scratch that would have wide-ranged-but-niche applications (i.e. some app, firmware, or library that fills an important-but-unrecognized niche)
Design the code to be intuitive to you and you alone, prioritize functionality over readability, forgo documentation, and abstract as much as possible. You can be the only contributor during the developmental stage
Go public and get as many people as possible to adopt your project
Continue maintaining until you die
Now companies and people that have unknowingly become heavily reliant on this are going to scramble to continue maintaining it, but will only be willing to create surface-level bandaid patches and will avoid making any more fundamental changes for fear of breaking literally everything everywhere because now the stakes are too high to take a fuck-it-we-ball approach. This is why it's important to be niche: it reduces the chances of an actual tech wizard coming in and reverse-engineering the whole thing.
Voila, your contributions shall remain for all time, like some sort of mystical wizard's tome on whose magic the world continues to spin

~~Yeah I maintain a 30 year old legacy codebase how could you tell~~