On Maintenance

When Stewart Brand sat down to write The Maintenance of Everything, he was trying to do something almost nobody had done: describe the act of keeping things working as a discipline of its own.¹

Most writing about objects is about their making — the design book, the architecture monograph, the cookbook. Maintenance is what happens after the book closes. It is the work that nobody photographs. It is the gutters cleaned, the brake pads swapped, the database compacted, the cat fed.

The art of maintenance is, in a sense, the art of paying close attention to one thing for a very long time.²

A personal website is a maintenance object. You build it once and then, if you are honest, you spend the rest of your life keeping it alive: pruning links, updating dependencies, retyping copy that aged badly, deleting pages you no longer believe.

Three rules I keep returning to

1. The newest thing goes at the top. Reverse-chronological is not laziness; it is the cheapest possible expression of “I last touched this.”
2. Make every page printable. If a page does not survive being printed in black and white on cheap paper, it does not survive.
3. Write for the reader you will be in five years. That reader is forgetful and busy and slightly suspicious of their younger self.³

The third is the hardest. Most of what I have written about software was correct on the day I wrote it and is now embarrassing. The cure is not to write less; the cure is to mark the embarrassing parts as embarrassing and leave them up. A working footbridge with a dated plaque is more useful than no footbridge.

What changes, what stays

The site is held together with three pieces of infrastructure:⁴

WEB    Static site (Astro), pinned to an edge CDN.
AUTH   Single Express process on Fly, one DB per signed-in user.
DB     One CouchDB process, also on Fly.

Of those, only the static site has been rewritten in the last four years. The auth box and the database have been touched maybe ten times. That is the right ratio for a personal site: the front of the building gets repainted; the foundation is left alone unless it is leaking.

A note on the page

The page you are reading is set in a single typeface at a single size on a single grid. There is one accent color, used only to mark links. The decisions you do not have to make are the decisions you cannot get wrong.

That is not a design philosophy. It is a maintenance philosophy. Every visual decision you bake into a site is a decision you will spend the rest of its life either honoring or apologizing for. The fewer you make, the less of the site you have to keep alive.