I must announce the immediate end of service of SSLPing
This project was killed by invisible complexity. I felt a little sad
reading about it. There are lots of comments talking about the
sustainability of projects with respect to money and burnout, the need
to pay for services etc. I get that and agree. But I also get the
impression that wouldn't have helped here.When we reach a situation where some unknown person pushes an upstream
update, which causes a cascade of problems that even someone with deep
technical knowledge and daily connection to the project cannot unpick,
that's a breakdown in modularity/dependency.It's what we faced in the 1990s and from it evolved package managers,
version control, dependency management and all the good things.I think in 2022 we're back in a similar situation again.
Virtualisation, containers, cloud services and whatnot have regressed
development reliability.I predict the day when a really major service provider comes out and
says; "Sorry everyone. It's been 10 days downtime. We've put our 1000
top engineers on the problem and nobody knows what's wrong. We just
can't fix it."