This is just a small addendum to my building article. I don’t think it’s as interesting, but I’m in the middle of figuring out something else with Qt, so I thought I’d write this.
Most apps need to be updated at some point. The app that I wrote was for a one day festival, so it was only expected to be used that one day. Well, it came around for the festival again, so I made a few tweaks. I was tempted to switch to a better REST back-end, and to use a more flexible client. But, it all worked pretty well. I didn’t want to touch stuff that worked pretty well as it was.
What I did change
Basically, it was mostly stuff that I didn’t have the time to do correctly the first time. Improved some of the GUI. I added a new section in the app, so I added a new data type that I was fetching from the server. I had gotten clever with templates last time. Ironically, it made the code not as generic. I was less attached to the code after a year, so I could throw it away. The last part was cleaning up the hacky Qt Project file so I didn’t have to manually tweak the debug/release paths for different platforms.
The big win
Basically, I didn’t have to update any code because of versions. Almost. I had upgraded to Qt 5.9, which required no changes. (That has never happened between Xcode versions, even when it was Objective-C.) Midway through, I did update because of Qt Creator asked me to, which did require some path changes. Silly me, I know better. Don’t upgrade when you’re in the middle of a project. Luckily, it was minor, and happened to be one of the things I was taking time to do the right way (instead of the hack I had done last time).
Conclusion
Well, this was super short. But, the big take away is that maintenance was minimal. A year later, I only had to make feature improvements, and no bit-rot to distract me. I only made the code better.
Once again, the code is on github.
