The Digital Press

A presentation titled "Building the Hundred-Year Web Service" explores how to create web services that endure for decades by carefully choosing stable, low-maintenance technologies. The speaker emphasizes embracing software "warts" as indicators of backward compatibility, which helps avoid future maintenance burdens.

Why it matters: Choosing tech with known warts ensures long-term stability, preventing sudden breakage from changing external factors.

The big picture: Simple web pages last 40+ years, while desktop apps average a decade and phone apps only a couple, highlighting web longevity.

The other side: Some argue that keeping warts means tolerating unsafe defaults and legacy design flaws, potentially causing security and maintenance issues.

Commenters say: Readers debate whether warts signal resilience or technical debt, discuss trade-offs between legacy and new tools, and note the importance of simplicity and backward compatibility.