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by joezydeco 490 days ago
I'm referring to embedded, not web dev.

When times get tight the new projects get shitcanned and the 10 year-old cash cow design gets the promised new features.

One crusty project I worked on was a legacy control board for a piece of restaurant equipment. The customer, the company that built the actual machine, had been building this product for 40 years. It had been through two PCB redesigns and two different microcontrollers, but the logic was tried and true and had to survive. A port of the project from 6800 assembly to C had completely gone off the rails and the contractor was dumped. All it took was a 20-opcode fix to a routine that the contractor just couldn't grok.