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Jeff Kaufman
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Designing Low Upkeep Software September 25th, 2021
                                meta, tech  [html]

It's common for me to get excited about a personal project, put a
bunch of time into it, and then lose interest. As much as possible, I
want them to continue working; upkeep isn't fun. What does designing
for minimum maintenance look like?

The biggest piece is minimizing your dependencies, and limiting them
to ones that value backwards compatibility. Most of my projects are
on the web, which means I have an unavoidable dependency on browsers,
but this is fine because browsers strongly prioritize keeping
existing websites working.

On the server I run Ubuntu LTS until it's near the end of its
supported lifetime. Every two years I run do-release-upgrade and move
to the next one. This cost is shared over many jefftk.com projects,
so it isn't too bad.

Many projects can just be hand-written HTML/JS/CSS. No build system,
no libraries, just speaking the browser's native languages. These
don't need any technical maintenance; they just keep working.

One step from there are projects where I need a little bit of
server-side support. For example, I write my blog posts as plain
HTML, but I need headers, footers, indexes, and RSS. Each time I
change my site I run a script which creates/updates all these
additional files. If I want to change something about the
presentation of my site then I need to dig into code, and very
occasionally something will break when updating the site, but just
displaying my existing stuff doesn't require any maintenance.

Then we get to the tricky stuff: projects which need real time custom
code. Things like Bucket Brigade and blog comment inclusion. How I
approach this:

  * Code in python, with no dependencies beyond the standard library.
    As with browsers, python rarely drops support for widely used
    functionality. Moving to python3 was a bit annoying, but I waited
    a long time and then used 2to3. Avoiding dependencies made this
    easy.

  * Store data on the file system, including for caching. It's not as
    elegant as a proper database, but it doesn't require an
    additional process or dependency. Debugging and backup are very
    simple, because everything is visible.

  * Implement as much as possible on the client.

  * Leave out features if they can't be implemented simply, or would
    require more than minimal server-side processing.

For example, I taught my comment requester to fetch comments from the
EA Forum and LessWrong two years ago, and I don't expect to have to
think about that code again until there are breaking changes to the
upstream API.

This is not how I approach design at work, or necessarily how I would
recommend doing so. Having a budget where initial creation is
essentially free (fun!) while maintenance is extremely expensive
(drugery!) is a dramatic exaggeration for most software development.
But this process works very well for my hobby code.

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Jeff Kaufman
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