Does anyone know that story of some file or system that do many users rely on in their own infrastructure but it’s maintained by like 1 dude on his free time?
The one mentioned is the node.js story. It wasn’t a long term thing, as it was just a matter of replacing the code and many had their own local versions and weren’t relying on a core source like others that broke. But dependency, no redundancy, not breaking gracefully, they all are avoidable problems that are all around waiting for whatever little block topples for them.
Does anyone know that story of some file or system that do many users rely on in their own infrastructure but it’s maintained by like 1 dude on his free time?
Pretty sure you’re thinking of tzdb, the time zone database: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-one-guy-in-california-keeps-the-worlds-computers-on-the-right-time-a97a5493bf73
An adjacent and thematically resonant story is the volunteer effort that powers curl, which so many people use: https://thenewstack.io/the-world-runs-20-billion-instances-of-curl-wheres-the-support/
CURL got some kind of contract with several embedded hardware manufacturers, at least it’s financially stable.
Stardew valley?
Here’s the link to the ExplainXKCD about this image.
The one mentioned is the node.js story. It wasn’t a long term thing, as it was just a matter of replacing the code and many had their own local versions and weren’t relying on a core source like others that broke. But dependency, no redundancy, not breaking gracefully, they all are avoidable problems that are all around waiting for whatever little block topples for them.
Which one? I’m willing to bet there’s several.
xz, a case-in-point example of one way things can go wrong.