| I've been in the IT racket for over 30 years, so maybe I have an unfair advantage in terms of candidates. I helped rewrite FIS (RSTS) as XENTIS (VMS) for Park Software in the early 1980s and worked on it for over a decade. It lasted as long as VMS did. This was the prototypical "report writer" / wizard. I wrote a logistics system for a nonprofit on donated VAX hardware. That lasted a decade before Y2K doomed their accounting system (VAX don't care about no steenkin' Y2K!) and both were replaced together. I wrote a procmail guide (documentation) and a web page with a javascript-based .procmailrc wizard that rattled around the internet for a while. I've got various pieces of automation which have been ported to different systems for as long as two decades (I don't think I have anything currently running which is older than that). I invite you to view the repos I have pinned at GitHub: https://github.com/m3047/ although none is older than 2019. I seem to be building a command-line based federated SIEM leveraging DNS and Redis. At this point I don't know if it will ever see the light of day in terms of wider availability, haven't found anyone else who's onboard with this level of sedition (yet). I've built other software which was popular for a short while. I'll offer an honorable mention for http://twiki.org/ as I used to curate a distribution. I'm still personally running the version based on the Dakar release from 2006. I've patched a couple of security issues and made some small changes due to changes in Perl in that time. So what makes code last? It's not a beauty contest. It solves a problem, but you can solve the problem without it. It doesn't sit astride a shear layer. It inspires confidence in terms of predictability. It offers useful internal telemetry or other mechanisms which allow that confidence to be tested, explored, or extended. Oftentimes it doesn't solve THE problem, but is composable to solve various problems. It doesn't chase trends (XENTIS pretty much filled out out every useful feature we could think of in its niche, but it stayed in that niche). It might be personal bias, but configuration is declarative or at least machine parseable and accessible (so you can compare configs over the last decade or more). |