How to Make Sure That Nobody Will Ever Use My Excellent Software

by Benedikt Stockebrand

Abstract

One of the greatest successes that a coder can achieve is writing a piece of excellent software and at the same time ensuring that nobody will ever use it---or at least nobody will ever use it again.

Writing bad, useless code is easy. But making excellent code useless through a variety of subtle, low-effort techniques, like sneaking minor changes "that shouldn't affect most users" into a "maintenance update", writing almost correct documentation, inventing an unintelligible configuration syntax or creating subtle dependencies and incompatibilities with other code is the true art of coding.

The talk presents a number of real-world highlights that show how minimum effort can achieve maximum devastation, teaching even the most stubborn user or administrator a lesson they deserve---a lesson to stay away from my software.

Author bio

Benedikt Stockebrand is a BSD-biased "generic Unixer" with a strong background in system administration and large-scale data center design and operation. He is working as a freelance trainer, author, IT journalist and consultant with a current focus on IPv6 operations.

He has been repeatedly charged with offensive sarcasm but so far escaped conviction.

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