When your code is nearly old enough to vote

[denise]

My talk at this year's linux.conf.au was "When Your Codebase Is Nearly Old Enough To Vote": a case study of Dreamwidth and all the horrible horrible things we've found down there underneath the couch cushions, along with the lessons we've learned about when to rewrite them and when to leave them alone.

You can view the YouTube recording (sorry, no transcript), or check out the slides!

Comments

[cyprinella]

Heh, the anonymous link story. I remember when that happened. Also the change from showing images on anon comments when you hit reply.

[denise]

The other story I was going to tell but had to cut for time: so, people keep asking us for the ability to select 'no icon' while they're commenting, even if they have a default icon set. We looked into it, figuring it couldn't be anything more than a quick change, right? ...turns out, the only reason that no icon displays if you don't have a default icon set is because of a bug that's been there since icons were introduced in like 1999 or so, and trying to do it deliberately would require rewriting the entire icon code. And that is why you can't choose 'no icon' when posting. :P

[cyprinella]

Huh, that wasn't one I ever used. I could see how it would be useful though if you did.

Personally I still miss the html dinosaurs of blink and marque.