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critical mass
February 20th, 2005
when a codebase gets so large and unmanageable, that it’s impossible to work with. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus epsilon bugs. When software achieves critical mass, it can never be fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten.
yes that’s how i feel about dmb right now. a bit sad but more reflecting. it doesn’t surprise me if the total solid coding time i spent on that site is over 10,000 hours.
the foundation of dmb, the now extincted software devbb, was very poorly written. back then i didn’t know better so when i first started hacking i wasn’t concerned with its efficiency. time goes on, i was more focused on getting “cool” features implemented than making the code more efficient. i guess for the most part, you can’t blame me. i was a naive and new coder and no one really gave me a heads up. the recent server move for dmb really got me thinking. no this is not the first time i thought about how inefficently is dmb coded but it just hit me, if it keeps growing like this, eventually it will break or it will be too big for me to handle.
i’ve considered rebuilding the board with another bb software like phpbb. but how much time will that take to make it to today’s standard? i also question my ability. how much more efficient can i make it if i were to rebuild it? what happens when technology gets even more advanced in the future? am i gonna have to rebuild it again?
my feeling toward dmb is so mixed. sometimes i imagine myself running dmb until i’m retired. other times i feel eventually i will let it go. maybe one day my amibition will die down tho i know i will always love programming.
