Recovering from bit rot

One of the things that’s hard as a developer is keeping your legacy code up to date.  It’s all too easy to fire-and-forget; write your code, debug it just enough so that it compiles, and then forget it until it breaks again.  I’m guilty of that as well.  In fact, just today I discovered that my continuous deployment configuration for Boomle was broken…for the past 3 months.

After merging my code from a private repo over to Github, it still didn’t work.  After updating the Hudson build configuration to point at the proper repos and to respond to the proper webhooks (to get automatically triggered on a new check-in), it STILL didn’t work.  You see, not only does configuration change, but SDKs and APIs shift out from under you.  The iOS SDK had changed out from under my project, and the Xcode configuration was pointing at libraries and SDKs that no longer were shipped by Apple.

The lesson for me here is this: I need to get off my ass every few weeks to at least look at my source code.  Kick the tires a little, hit a build every now and then, and check that everything is still okay.  Because the longer you wait, the more things can fall apart.  Each one of those issues I mentioned above would have been simple to fix, had I addressed them right away.  But the more problems that build up, the more difficult it is to clean up your code.

As it is, I still need to integrate Game Center with Boomle, and refactor its drawing routines to be more efficient.

Now, I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions.  Instead, I believe in making resolutions whenever they’re relevant, and sticking to them without the excuse of a New Year to motivate you.  My resolution is to take care of my projects proactively, instead of forgetting them.  Treat it like the quasi-living thing that I’m anthropomorphizing it to be, because even inactive projects need love too.