The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, Debtember 12, 2018

Wait! How did I end up with legacy code? I never got the memo!

I changed the image on my homepage. Normally, I wouldn't comment on this, but this time? This time I had to track down a sixteen year old bug in code I wrote in a language that makes COBOL look terse that manages the non-bloggish part of the website. All because I broke from twenty-one years of tradition and used a different image size! (It's a really good picture a friend took and it really benefits from the non-traditional size)

I had thought the code I wrote would deal with the non-traditional size and yes, it picked up on the new size, but that size was then used for every self-portrait on the site.

It's also been ten years since I last dealt with the code, and even then, it was just to get it running under a newer version of the language. This time, I had to figure out what the hell I was doing sixteen years ago. From various timestamps, I can tell it only took about an hour to track down the bug and fix it (eight new lines of code, mostly under 140 characters in length—sigh) but it certainly felt longer.

This is one of those situations where the language is ugly, the solution aggravating to maintain and yet, it works, and for what I want it's still the best solution to the problem of maintaining a static website.

Sigh.

Hopefully, I can go another ten years before the next bug manifests itself.

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