I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over the weekend, as I worked through some old code of my own and that from a bunch of other developers on DailyLit. My exposure to “software archeology” goes as far as back as the first time I earned money from programming. I was 17 and had just come ba...

I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over the weekend, as I worked through some old code of my own and that from a bunch of other developers on DailyLit. My exposure to “software archeology” goes as far as back as the first time I earned money from programming. I was 17 and had just come ba...