You are writing legacy code right this moment

It's like writing with Avocado
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Published ~ 2 minutes read

The moment I laughed, I knew I blew it. I was not going to pass this job interview. Not because I couldn’t answer the question, but because the interviewer sneered while asking about my experience with Silverlight, Microsoft’s long-dead answer to Flash. He warned me to “expect lower pay” due to my lack of expertise.

A year earlier, his company had bet big on Silverlight, rewriting their web app into a cutting-edge relic. When the technology crumbled, their developers fled. Now they were scrambling to salvage their sinking ship, desperate for programmers fluent in a ghost system. I laughed because they gambled, they lost, but they still thought they had the upper hand. They never called back. I didn’t care.

It's easy to laugh at a technology that never takes hold. But the truth is, just like a fresh avocado, every line of code you write is already decaying.

When I built this blog, I used PHP 5.3. It felt revolutionary compared to the ancient systems I maintained at work. But code doesn’t age in dog years. It rots faster. When I migrated servers years later, PHP 7 refused to run my “modern” framework without spitting errors. My pristine code had fossilized.

A former team of mine once staked their product on Angular 1.x. Then Angular 2 arrived. It was not an upgrade, it required a complete rewrite. What was once an asset became an anchor. Rewrites cost money. Expertise evaporates. Technologies don’t just fade—they collapse.

This isn’t a lament. It’s the reality of our work: code is perishable. The shiny framework you champion today will be tomorrow’s burdensome legacy. The syntax you memorized will mutate. The platform you trusted will betray you.

That’s why I cling to “boring” technology. Not because it’s flawless, but because it’s endured. Legacy systems are the best teachers: they reveal what survives when hype dies. Your job isn’t to outrun obsolescence. It’s to write today’s code knowing it will be torn out someday, replaced by someone laughing at your choices.

Write Anyway!

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