moving and downsizing

This past weekend I was helping my aunt move to a small studio apartment. I was unhappily surprised by the amount of stuff she collected in the last few decades. We had to get rid of everything that isn’t necessary for her life or an important part of her memories.

In the many types of development work we all do, how much is old stuff that no one knows what it is for or how it works? Like my aunt, we all hold on to many things that take up space and yet perform no useful functions. Methodologies and workflows are the hard drive equivalent to an overstuffed hall closet and contain a mixture of treasures and junk. Maybe it’s time to perform a virtual move and clean up those out of date scripts and patches. Just because the IT group added multi-terabytes of storage doesn’t mean that you have to fill it with useless data.