The True Gift of Your Former Code

I’m not in the same league as most developers I have the pleasure of meeting, but I had been pretty proud of the little Django app I put together for my old portfolio site.

It worked pretty well. I had loads of plans for it when I made it — none of which came to fruition. In the end, it served it’s purpose and I learned a lot in the process.

One thing I learned was that if you don’t know what your doing, you can kill your ability to locally develop if you let things sit for over six months and forget how everything is configured.

The main thing I learned, however, is that no matter how decently you may have set things up, it’s possible that it’s a big pile of spaghetti about to topple off your plate. As I was setting up my new site to live at my beta URL, I decided to use an old static portfolio app on Webfaction as the “application” — why duplicate effort, right? As it turns out, ages ago, I’d somehow gotten my little media serving app PUT IN THE SAME DIRECTORY.

It wasn’t until half the media on my old site was gone that I realized what was happening.

I’m not what you’d call a “DevOps” kind of guy. Nor am I a sysadmin. So, I don’t really have true backups in place. I’m sure if I got in touch with Webfaction, they could bring it back up.

You know what, though? Screw it. New site’s live at http://bryanlrobinson.com. Let’s not look back. I hated the look of that site anyway.