Technology is all about Humans

Technology isn't immune to human weakness

2025-11-19, by DrFriendless

This is a thing that’s been on my mind for the last few weeks as I’ve been bashing this site back into order. And before that, it was on my mind as I was upgrading technologies at work. Technology ages and weakens just as humans do.

When I started at my job it used some version of Scala. In fact it used several versions of Scala, the previous devs were not authoritarian minimalists - they seemed to think if it wasn’t broke don’t fix it, just leave it for the next developer to get bogged down in it. So I spent some time deciding which version of Scala the code base used, and which version of Java, and so on. And then when I had all the versions sorted-ish, I started upgrading them.

And that would be when I would find that the code used some Scala unit test framework that had been unsupported for five years because the developer had got a new job. Or something wanted to modify the bootclasspath, because it was coded for JDK 1.5. Or the source code for something didn’t exist because it had always been proprietary.

So for a lot of the dependencies, I removed them entirely. I rewrote so many unit tests to JMock or Mockito or something (I still can’t tell them apart) - frameworks that would last a few years longer. I removed or rewrote some libraries. I decompiled sourceless code, fixed the method names up, and fixed the bugs in it. And I grew to hate dependencies, because they made my code rot.

As technologies evolve, software must be tended or it goes bad. Every third-party dependency in the code base is a vulnerability, in that you are awaiting the whim of that third-party every time you need the dependency updated.

I can’t find a quote for this, but I read a long time ago that before you adopt a new technology, you’d like the new solution to be 10 times better than the old one. (I can find stories about Bill Gross saying something like this, but I don’t think he was talking from a developer point of view.) That is, you do not disrupt the codebase or introduce a dependency for an incremental improvement. Only do so for a vast improvement. Adding another potentially weak link to your software for minimal improvement is a poor decision.

This is why I’m not afraid to cast off dependencies - I’d like the weaknesses in my code to be my own problem, thank you very much.

Of course, Extended Stats is a perfect example of what I’m saying. The project has evolved from a static site generator written in Python to a serverless-ish dynamic site written in TypeScript, and suffered much neglect and abuse along the way as it is lashed to my own personal preferences and fortune. Well, long may the site prosper!