Tomorrow's legacy software, today

Even if you do everything right, time will make everything legacy software eventually.

1 min read

HEY! This is a DRAFT!

You sneaky little guy, how did you find this?

Well now that you're here... you can read whatevers here if you want, just don't share it around please.

Thanks!

I’m working on a greenfield next.js application right now and while talking through architecture with one of my coworkers, he made a joke that stuck with me:

You know you’re just making technical debt for 10 years from now, right? You’re making the new redacted internal application.

While this doesn’t meet the “traditional” definition of technical debt, I get what he meant. Given time, all software- even well tested, well written, well architected, and well liked software- becomes legacy software, which feels like technical debt.

Really, all software?

I think there should be a few metaphorical asterisks around this idea. If you’re software has the advantage of being rigorously maintained and kept up to date, then it’s likely you can avoid the “legacy” label.

About me

I'm Mykal Machon, I'm a web developer / coffee nerd from British Columbia, Canada. I'm currently working at the University of the Fraser Valley as a Systems Analyst.

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