The other day, I went to reread an amazing article Eli Goldberg wrote on “Verifying a bug” written when we were both working at Flock. I was saddened to find that http://wiki.flock.com/ has been replaced by a sparse “Flock developer website” and I couldn’t find that article.
Thankfully, I was able to find the article using the Wayback Machine provided by the Internet Archive. I also found some of the awesome articles written by Vera Horiuchi.
Eli and Vera are among the most talents people I’ve ever worked with, but alas even more than me they weren’t software developers, and we were living in a software developer world.
Sure, there is some nostalgia mixed into my sadness, but the destruction of these documents is a good reminder of some things:
- Software is a lot more than code. It is an experience and different participants will appreciate different aspects.
- A team needs to have diverse leadership to create an experience that will meet many people’s needs.
- Respect and love your leaders even if you don’t understand their expertise. Seek guidance from experts you trust that do understand that area.
- Do garden your knowledge, but be careful not to discard knowledge out of ignorance. Technology today allows us to archive the knowledge for others to benefit from, refresh, or transfer.
- Open Up A New World Reading Center
- Infusing Technology Into Our School Music Program
- Literature On Demand
8 Comments
Nice of you to humanize this. I’ve been in the trenches long enough to have memories of not just pages that have blinked out of existence but people who have gone off-hook. It is, after all, a very social process.
I kind of like google’s “knol” idea (Only “kind of” because I find that I’ve become skeptical of all things google.) … it might be that they’ve found a way of personalizing development. (Compare the number of people who know the term “wiki” with that of those who recognize the name “Ward Cunningham”.)
Not everyone has any desire to spider the history of this or that, but those of us who do usually have some reasonable need. We shouldn’t have to use WayBack, but I’m grateful to them for being there!
best of the season to you
I’ve done my share of searching for lost articles, and people. People come and go on the internet, and most often, their work dissappears after them, unless they’re working for a University or something which archives their pages. This is a probably more due to the increasing value of digital real estate, where any forgotten domain with even a tiny bit of traffic is quickly replaced as soon as it gets vacated.
Hey Lloyd,
wiki.flock.com was becoming so out of date with misinformation and we didn’t have the time to keep it current, we decided to take it down. Sometimes allowing wrong information to be available is worse than no information. I also wouldn’t say the information was destroyed but rather archived (though not very accessible).
Eli’s notes on verifying a bug are definitely very good and I’ve restored the page in all its glory here:
http://developer.flock.com/wiki/Verifying_A_Bug
Thanks for the heads up.
Mike
The rate at which knowledge and people disappear from the web or at least move so substantially that it requires extra effort to find again proves that there are still innovations to be developed.
Now if I could just remember my third grade teachers name perhaps I could find her on the web!
On a slightly more serious note I would expect some of the same old problems to be in existence for the foreseeable future.
A Traverler On The Journey!
Gene
Great article on verifying a bug and great post about…life. You put your head down and go to work a youngster and next thing you know you pick it up and YOU are the ‘old guy’. When did late 30’s become old? I thought the 30’s was the new 20’s, well don’t ask anyone actually in their 20’s.
Again, great article on bugs!
All the best,
Michael Rowles
SMB Security
CopiaTECH
I totally agree with Micheal, I still recall pages that I visited many years ago that were so modern, they are now gone. There is a nostalgia even on the net.
Cheers,
Tristan
Although I’m sure there was never a trace of malice, I think you raise a good point about the importance of making sure “published” articles go up in a form where the publisher is invested in keeping it available.
I’m glad you appreciated the bug verification article enough to motivate Mike to put it back up (thanks guy). Ironically, did you remember that it was originally written 8 years ago for a public website of a long out-of-business company — where it also disappeared for years after they went belly-up?
Personally, I think this article should have been adapted for/migrated into the Mozilla wiki/QA docs where it would have been propagated more broadly, but nothing happened when we ran that by them 2 years ago.
Recently, I’ve spent about ~40-50 hours working on an article about how services marketing practices could be applied to software development. (I think I sent you an early-ish draft via IM, if not, you are welcome to it.). I’m definitely going to make sure that, if it can be published, it’ll go up with a venue where it’ll actually *stay up*. There’s no way I’d put that much work into something, without compensation, other than to have it be accessible to people for the foreseeable future.
P.S. Mike, since you didn’t also restore the “3 golden rules” article, I’ll hope that means you whipped your dev team into shape and solved those three areas by now!
I often think of all the information that is lost when servers die or pages are changes/deleted/lost. Thankfully, most information has a copy of itself somewhere else on the net (like the wayback machine or for recent losses, google’s cache).
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[...] happened with wiki.flock.com Lloyd, your recent post about knowledge disappearing and Flock “destroying” documents was a bit harsh. Did you send an email to any of your [...]