Web Development

3430 readers

6 users here now

Welcome to the web development community! This is a place to post, discuss, get help about, etc. anything related to web development

What is web development?

Web development is the process of creating websites or web applications

Rules/Guidelines

Follow the programming.dev site rules
Keep content related to web development
If what you're posting relates to one of the related communities, crosspost it into there to help them grow
If youre posting an article older than two years put the year it was made in brackets after the title

Related Communities

Wormhole

[email protected]

Some webdev blogs

Not sure what to post in here? Want some web development related things to read?

Heres a couple blogs that have web development related content

https://frontendfoc.us/ - [RSS]
https://wesbos.com/blog
https://davidwalsh.name/ - [RSS]
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/
https://sia.codes/posts/ - [RSS]
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/ - [RSS]
https://www.bennadel.com/ - [RSS]
https://web.dev/ - [RSS]

Credits

Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How to handle the erasure of your 'digital legacy'? (self.webdev)

submitted 1 year ago by TechyDad to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been struggling with something for a while now and ironically a sitcom from the 80's finally helped me pinpoint the problem. My TV was on for background noise and I noticed that it was an episode of Family Ties. In the episode, Elyse Keaton was having a problem. A prominent building that she designed was being torn down and replaced by a cookie cutter mini-mall. She was struggling with her "legacy" - her mark on the world - disappearing. After the building was gone, what evidence would there be that Elyse Keaton was there?

I'm facing a similar issue. I don't like getting into my day job too much online (for various reasons), but suffice it to say that applications that I developed for decades are being sunset/replaced. I've developed quite a lot over the decades, but eventually it would all be replaced. Once it is, what will I have as "proof that TechyDad was here"?

How do you handle the existential crisis of our works being digital and transient versus having an actual, physical product?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] illah 3 points 1 year ago

Not specific to work but this is a topic I’m interested in. It’s not a great solution, but iCloud has a legacy contact feature, and I back up all my important stuff there for availability to my heirs should something happen unexpectedly. Almost my entire family is Mac (or at least iOS / iPhone) so this works for us.

Longer term I’d like something more comprehensive. For example I don’t have records or media to share in terms of music or reading habits to pass down…I’d be open to having my Spotify likes passed down for example.

Anyway, for apps I imagine a similar thing could work, if you had a local environment snapshot you could pass on. But it’s tough as in 30yrs for example you might not even have hardware that could run the software of today. My buddy does digital archival stuff and this is a big part of his work, preserving the associated systems beyond just the code.