Death Spiral of Technical Debt
Dispatches from the Frozen North has moved.
This is the third time I’ve had to perform a major technology shift for this blog since I first started writing in 2003, and arguably the most disruptive. For the 2020 move, I decided it was time to get out of the business of maintaining my own technology stack and pay someone else to do it, so I’m now using Squarespace for hosting.
It’s been almost two years since I’ve even written an article here. The challenge is that I allowed my old site, running a Drupal instance, to get far enough behind the upgrade path that it became very difficult to bring up to the latest version. After a several failed attempts to upgrade I decided that it would be easier to just throw the whole thing away and start over from scratch. It was a death spiral of technical debt.
I’m hoping to be able to keep this updated a little more often now that I don’t have to worry about applying patches and updates all the time. It’s certainly been an eventful few years: since I last regularly maintained this site I’ve sold my company and taken a new job at U.S. Bank, become an empty-nester (at least while college is in session), started actual work on building a cabin at our place at Bogus Lake, and been in a romantic relationship with a coworker (my wife is OK with it, too).
Because context is important, I’ll also mention that She Who Puts Up With Me also recently started a new job, also at U.S. Bank, and during the COVID-19 lockdown we’re sharing a home office.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to bulk move all the content from my old blog to this new site. I have to copy and paste each article by hand, so I started with most of the articles from the most recent (Drupal) site from 2009 and on. So far I’ve moved just a handful from the older incarnation which ran under iBlog. The iBlog software produced static HTML, which turns out to be a hidden blessing since it means I still have a complete archive of everything from day one in 2003. I wrote very prolifically my first year or so (sometimes five times a day) so I’m combing through the older stuff and planning to just keep the things which aged well or have some sentimental value for me.
So welcome back. I hope you’ll be seeing more of me soon.