Post

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Tell me your team is entirely comprised of over-confident twenty-somethings without telling me your team is entirely comprised of over-confident twenty-somethings

Katie Drummond@katie-drummond.bsky.social

NEW: DOGE is planning to migrate the Social Security Administration codebase to a new programming language. This would normally take years. DOGE wants it done in months. That could put benefits for millions of Americans at risk. Scoop from @makenakelly.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/doge-r...

wired.comDOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase In Months, Risking Benefits and System CollapseSocial Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.

43 reposts257 likes

Tom Resing
@tomresing.com

Last time I made the decision to wholesale rewrite an existing codebase in a new language I was in my twenties, too! You have to be willing to make mistakes to learn. However, you need a safer space for that learning than a critical government infrastructure project.

零Rei
@othiym23.bsky.social

In 1998 I was working on a team that was helping Autozone with its web presence. We flew out to Memphis to meet with their IT team, and there was a team of about 20 IBM consultants there, who were modernizing Autozone's inventory management system, which dated back to the 60s.

零Rei
@othiym23.bsky.social

It had at its core a flat-file database that predated CODASYL, much less RDBMSes. By the time my team showed up, the IBM folks been working for about a year and had managed to get the database migrated to DB2 and were partway through porting the COBOL terminal interface to Java and a Web UI.

Chris Keene
@ck12.uk

Reminds me of this recent blogpost about building a modern frontend on to a legacy service (which has partly been re-written) meaning it still had to 'close' each night due to batch jobs. Still waiting for it to be rewritten dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/wh...

dafyddvaughan.ukWhy some DVLA digital services don't work at nightEvery few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Rather than answering it every time, I’ve decided to write this post, so I can poi...