huddling together on software stacks

Love this metaphor from Kartik:

Trying to build software for others is extremely disheartening. I can be eating my own dogfood on a daily basis for years and still newcomers hit bugs in their first 10 minutes.

I wonder if this is the major reason to huddle together on top of jenga stacks with tons of dependencies, terrified of fragmentation: You always need more testing than you think, and there's no way to compete with something that's been through that much testing.

There's a lively discussion following it about... what the hell it is we're all doing here, people who write software, who use computers.

I like this quote from Lu Wilson:

right, there are two ways software can be durable. one is to never die. another is to be easily resurrectable, similar to @dubroy's cold-blooded software

Alex Schroeder wrote a summary of the discussion as he saw it.