New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Finding “Dusty Deck” Clients
Ask HN: Finding “Dusty Deck” Clients
3 by jes | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I am a 61 year old software engineer and have worked in high tech for 30+ years. I have generally preferred to work on UNIX, Linux and macOS. I'd like to invest my remaining 10 (?) years or so helping people to maintain their "dusty decks" or at least, work themselves out of the jams that their accumulated technical debt is helping to create. My question is this: What would you do to find clients that have "dusty decks," where a dusty deck is a program that someone wrote years ago, probably in some language that is out of favor, and that yet still serves an important function? Most of my programming has been in C, C++, Perl, Common Lisp, shell, make, Python, a minor dalliance with Ruby, etc. 30+ years of GNU Emacs. If you wanted to find clients with dusty deck headaches, where would you begin to look? I'd like my prospects to know that I know how things go, how there are never enough hours in the day to do all that we would like to do, and how I'm never going to shame them for having dusty decks. No scoldings are coming. Instead, I'm going to show up, look at what's happening, propose a practical way forward, and once things are back on line, if they want to talk about other things, that's fine too. Thoughts? Namaste, John Edit: Add "Ask HN: " to title
3 by jes | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I am a 61 year old software engineer and have worked in high tech for 30+ years. I have generally preferred to work on UNIX, Linux and macOS. I'd like to invest my remaining 10 (?) years or so helping people to maintain their "dusty decks" or at least, work themselves out of the jams that their accumulated technical debt is helping to create. My question is this: What would you do to find clients that have "dusty decks," where a dusty deck is a program that someone wrote years ago, probably in some language that is out of favor, and that yet still serves an important function? Most of my programming has been in C, C++, Perl, Common Lisp, shell, make, Python, a minor dalliance with Ruby, etc. 30+ years of GNU Emacs. If you wanted to find clients with dusty deck headaches, where would you begin to look? I'd like my prospects to know that I know how things go, how there are never enough hours in the day to do all that we would like to do, and how I'm never going to shame them for having dusty decks. No scoldings are coming. Instead, I'm going to show up, look at what's happening, propose a practical way forward, and once things are back on line, if they want to talk about other things, that's fine too. Thoughts? Namaste, John Edit: Add "Ask HN: " to title
