Everything is scaffolding

I love it when software gets to the stage that the worldoutline is getting to.

For the last year, while under development, it’s been a hot steamy mess. But I use my messes, and I have users, so every time I had to undo a mistake, or had to change my mind about how something worked, it meant a difficult “corner-turn” where breakage would happen, and putting the pieces back together was often hard work.

But it seems to have paid off. The last set of changes have been cleanups. Taking out half-done experiments, and relying on frameworks that were experimental before but now are rely-able (or reliable). And as a side-product it’s gotten faster and faster, to the point where I can now link to pieces on the worldoutline from Twitter without taking the server offline while the bots that hack Twitter pound every link you push through there (Twitter might try to do something about this btw).

I just published a piece about infinite loops you might find interesting. I think it’s really cool that all of a sudden people are curious about how programs work. I love to tell stories, and it’s a challenge to find human terms to explain programming concepts. Everything in programming, of course, is human — the languages were designed by people, used by people. They fit our way of thinking. If insects had evolved into a high form of life maybe they would have come up with a different kind of programming. Hey for all we know they have. (That’s how programmers think, always questioning assumptions.)

Anyway, I expect to post more “over there” and at some point, “here” will move “there” as well. That’s another thing about the tech world, everything is scaffolding, it’s always just here to provide a basis for the next big thing that will replace this old thing.