Technical Issue Upon Technical Issue

[andrewducker]

My Daily Link Poster has gone from "Will generate posts, but can't reach Dreamwidth to post them, so I have to manually copy/paste them into the DW Update page" to "Will not generate posts at all". Which looks to be because Google App Engine has upgraded to Java 8, and Velocity (the formatter which converts my posts from a bunch of link objects into HTML) is incompatible.

So I'd need to get it working again, and update that. And possibly also update Objectify, the database access layer I'm using. Which might mean an upgrade on the data format. And, also, the UI is written in Angular v1, which has been obsolete since 2016, and probably has all sorts of holes in it.

Oh, and the HTML build process was built around Gulp/npm, which has _also_ had incompatible upgrades since I last touched any of the code.

So the question is, do I put a lot of effort into upgrading all of that? Or do I write something from scratch again, which would probably be a not dissimilar amount of work, and a lot cleaner to work with? By the time I'm upgrading the back end tooling, the UI libraries, and the build process, there really isn't a lot of the original system left.

And, of course, no matter what I do, in another couple of years whatever technology I build it on will probably be obsolete _again_. *sigh*

The moral of the story is, of course, that nobody hates computers as much as people who work with them.

Comments

[marahmarie]

I'd say nobody hates code as much as those who write it (the more I work on the hardware end of things the more "the same" I feel about it, but I've always enjoyed that, so it's probably just not gonna change).

Even something as supposedly simple as CSS, though...12 years of that and all it does is find new ways (speaking locally, mostly via my DW comment pages and Reading List) to break. I feel I could easily spend more time re-writing it then I do using the output. There's stuff in it to edit now but anything is more important... Like, just breathing qualifies.

To attempt to answer the question, though, a tear-down might be best. Even the better say, CSS rewrites I've done have looked good for a day (maybe a week) before showing themselves not up to snuff in various ways and were still carrying cruft. Just from the amount of code and libraries it sounds like you have to replace it's basically going to be re-building itself, anyhow.