software doesn't break down from heat. An app I write today will run until the hardware dies. I have a palm_os app I wrote in 1998 that still runs perfectly.
"software doesn't break down from heat. An app I write today will run until the hardware dies. I have a palm_os app I wrote in 1998 that still runs perfectly."
In an organization of any appreciable size, things change all the time.. and I'm not just talking about code (for which you could have a code freeze in an emergency situation like this), but the external systems you're connected to could change for reasons completely out of your control. Content changes can break stuff because of bugs in your code. Legacy systems could require all sorts of ongoing tweaking and maintenance. And, yes, heat can break your software if the server it's running on overheats.
Agreed.. but lets say you fire 99% of your engineers, and declare a code freeze (because there's no-one left to write code)..
Then in theory.. if you own the hardware and you've locked down the libraries... That code could keep running for a long time. Agreed it's not a Palm app, but with everything locked down, I'd argue it's safe
But now I can third party stuff changing. Payment processors and such. Those don't happen fast though, and 100% not so fast that a company the size of twitter can't work out a sunsetting.
To the heat can break software if the server it's running on overheats. I have a feeling twitter's has a system in place to scale out the faulty server.
My point was, comparing code to a car is silly. A car needs maintenance. Code in code freeze does not.
Software bit-rots. That app from 1998 doesn't interact with today's world. As the world evolves around us, needs change and software has to change to keep up. That's not to say there aren't companies out there that rely on some ancient Windows 98 software program running on similarly ancient hardware, because there are. But Twitter as a piece of software isn't some static thing. It's needs are constantly changing and the software has got to keep up.
Your PalmOS app doesn't run on any modern hardware except under emulation. (Which is sad, I loved my Centro and held onto it for as long as I could.) The last release of PalmOS was in 2007, 15 years ago. Most hardware from that long ago is dead, and thus your software is dead. broken down by entropy to the hardware.
Agreed. But my comment was in comparison to a car needing maintenance. If nothing changes and I drive my car for 5 years without taking a look under the hood, it will be a mess. If not a stitch of work is done on it, I'm in trouble.
If however I have an app and I don't look under the hood for 5 years, it could still run as good as it did when I locked it down. As you said some companies run on apps written for windows98. Those apps are still working as they always did.
I don't think it needs are constantly changing. Like it could freeze for weeks/months. Leave existing bugs and put versions in lock.
I do agree that it will eventually need to change, but that's where selective hiring comes in. Oh system X isn't great. Lets find a team for that, all else remains black-boxed.
Even discounting external changes, any reasonably complex system needs maintenance because time moves on and new interactions happen.
How many SSL certificates (internal or external) need re-issuing per month? Some of that can be automated, but in an organization as large as complex as Twitter some will be bespoke and manual, and a code freeze won't stop the clock.
How many new CVEs per month apply to Twitter's services and tooling? How many race conditions or other bugs are lurking, just waiting for the right time or traffic pattern to emerge? Twitter can't freeze inbound traffic without dire consequences.
Twitter is like your car, except that it's always running.
