Technical Debt or Contextually Correct Examples

Justin Biard -
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TL/DR: Some of the posts on this site are not evergreen, and I am unlikely to update all of them as things change over time. If you are reading this in the future, welcome! You might have to translate changes in versions, differences in APIs, etc., to achieve your goals.

So here we are, some date/time in the future.

  1. Read outdated posts while considering the context in which I wrote them.
  2. Feel free to send errata in context.

I cleaned up and purged my email mailing list recently and got a pretty good chuckle at an attempt to let me know that I failed to revise an old post.

Dear Commenter,
All I can say is I am sorry that it didn't work out, whatever "it" was. I wish we could have chatted about it, but mostly, I hope you eventually figured out a solution to your problem(s).

Technology posts are contextually correct at a point in time. They are things I want to share, remember later, or happen to be learning about. My best advice is to keep in mind the date posted and any version-specific context. Unless I marked an old post with date-stamped updates/errata, you should always assume it might be outdated if you run into problems. And doubly so if a post references some web or niche technology.

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My Pepaw used to say "RTFM," but I didn't really appreciate that until later in life. (R.I.P. Pepaw) The gist of RTFM is, when in doubt, always refer to the documentation of a thing.

Tiny changes in syntax, major version releases, tooling modifications, entire packages disappearing overnight, and more are all things that could happen from the time I wrote something until now. If you run into problems requiring updates or workarounds, please send me a suggestion or pull request. (You can find me on Twitter.)

In the meantime, Amazon just delivered my copy of "Sun Microsystems Core Java: Volume 1 Fundamentals," so I have some reading to catch up on.

Until next time friends,

Cheers-

Photo by Klaas on Unsplash
white and black type writer beside telephone on top of brown table
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