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Comment by abrookewood | Hacker News Reader

He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub"

https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/112766460393943288

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I'm confused. The article's author name is Pēteris Caune while the account you link is of one Dave Anderson.

What is the connection between the two?

The blog post by Peteris Caune includes a link to the Mastodon thread by Dave Anderson. The post you're replying to reposts the same Mastodon link, although it kind of implies that it was written by the same person who wrote the blog post, which isn't true.

Ahh sorry - I didn't realise I had mixed them up.

I don’t think that is possible.

Almost all software depends on other software. At the very least, it depends on the clients software. Which means you can’t ignore what Chrome or Safari changes for example.

It most certainly is. You can be pedantic and argue that you’re depending on an HTML rendering engine but so is everyone else. The key is minimizing unnecessary dependencies. This is seen as untenable in communities that love to crow about “social coding,” but there are other groups of people who are happily living that.

They just aren’t chattering away about it.

It depends on what you choose to rely on.

There's web tech from decades ago that still works almost entirely the same. If you stick to the most beaten path, you can really profit off it.

A lot of "legacy" software is still kicking because of this. Well... it works and solves the problem. And we can update it too, if we just stick to what we're doing. There's Perl scripts decades old still chugging along on servers all over the world. There's Windows applications written in the 90s that work pretty much exactly the same and are still updated in C++.

Well at the risk of spoiling an almost 70 year old book, the Shire didn't manage to escape being affected by larger middle earthly events either

I am running another "hobbit software" (just discovered the term) for the past 12 years, and I 100% agree with Pēteri and everything he said in this blog post!

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