An ode to a fallen function
Yesterday I witnessed a tragedy.
I watched helplessly as a util function I wrote was ruthlessly annihilated in a Github repository. It was a beautiful function suddenly made obsolete by changing business needs. I shook my fist at the clouds, and after my arms were tired from shaking, I had an epiphany: Nothing I create lasts. I’ve versioned endpoints, wrote thousands of lines of code, and completely refactored countless files. No matter how much code review something goes through, or its proximity to the bleeding edge of technology, or the hipness of its package.json, nothing can anticipate the needs of the future. I am in the business of creating ephemeral things that are constantly evolving. Living. Breathing.
Yet I wonder if there is anything out there that can transcend the confines of our mortal lives.
Consider the code itself. Assume for a moment that we’ve achieved the impossible and have written code so breathtakingly elegant we’re tempted to etch it into stone to be carried in a sacred ark. All eventual needs anticipated. All best practices considered. Completely bug-free. Security risk-free. Even gluten-free, for the future digital archeologists living in a terrifying world of digitized weaponized gluten.
This immaculate code would only last as long as the hardware it is stored on. We think that once our code is on Github, or in the “cloud,” that it’s safe forever. We are sticking our heads in the sand and lying to ourselves. Companies fail all the time. Server centers can be blown up by rebel forces or destroyed by natural disasters. The server hardware itself needs to be replaced every 3–5 years by unreliable humans capable of extremely unpredictable and often times breathtakingly stupid actions. We are a species striving to reach the very asymptote of stupidity, every day inching closer to the event horizon of our own destruction. We cannot trust ourselves to make responsible choices about the future much less maintain these servers forever.
We could then point to ourselves as an example of something that lasts but we’d be wrong. Our bodies and identities seem to last a lifetime but nearly all our constituent parts do not. According to Live Science, red blood cells regenerate every 4 months. Skin cells every 2 to 3 weeks. We last a lifetime as a concept and use the pronoun “I” without ever thinking about the true nature of the antecedent.
Not even our greatest wonders will stand the test of time. Without ongoing maintenance, the Empire State Building will collapse within a few hundred years. The Great Pyramids will be buried by sand in 10,000 years. Mount Rushmore, made of granite, will be barely recognizable 10,000–20,000 years from now but completely unrecognizable shortly later. Some say our longest lasting contributions will be the humble sewers and mines underneath our feet. Everything that is important to us and everything we’ve ever loved will one day wither and die.
Out of desperation, we could take a look at humanity’s boldest effort at achieving immortality: the golden disk aboard the Voyager 2 spacecraft currently hurtling towards the darkest unknowns of the cosmos. They say this record could last indefinitely if the spacecraft doesn’t get too close to a star, collide with a planetary body, or get sucked into a black hole. Even so, it’s pretty unlikely that an entity will ever gaze upon its contents. It’s not meaningful to have something that lasts forever if no one ever sees it.
Our fixation on longevity is based upon the flawed notion that the value of a thing depends on how long it lasts. We create ephemeral valuable things every day. Engineers create web applications that are useful, carpenters build chairs to prop us up while we work, and researchers create medicine to cure our bodies. We converse with coworkers around the water cooler. We smile, laugh, and cry. We, ephemeral beings, create other ephemeral beings. Are all these things worthless?
No way. My beloved and recently departed util function had a brief and wondrous life. There is meaning inherent in our participation in the divine act of creation.
Would you like to rage against the meaninglessness of our lives by creating beautiful ephemeral things? Let’s grab a coffee and talk about it. You should also consider working for Upside, where we fully embrace the ephemeral nature of software development as something unavoidable and necessary in our journey towards better understanding the needs of our customers and creating the best product possible.
