Since launching my personal website, I've had a death counter with the number of days I have remaining. Based on that count, I'm about 2 months away from ~27000 days. Each thousand-day decrement is a pretty big deal for me, and leads to a lot of self reflection. As a result of this, I've been thinking a bit about how to design more projects that will out live me.
Today, most projects we deploy have an inherent shelf life. When you write code and deploy it to AWS or Heroku or Vercel or whatever, that application will stop working when you can't pay the bill (be it because of personal, corporate, or societal collapse).
The code you wrote will remain in existence on a drive somewhere. When those drives are obsolete, your work will be quietly extinguished. You will die a second death.
You may have seen users on Github with the "Arctic Code Vault Contributor" badge. Users with this badge have had at least one of their contributions backed up in a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard since 2020. Code stored there will probably exist for a while.
But in the same way that I don't really care to read over Roman Imperial tax records, people of the future probably won't care to read over the 50 line Python web scraper I wrote for my friend Matt's company in 2019. Moreover, the world is now and will continue to be filled with increasing amounts of digital sludge. The value of words on paper is rapidly approaching zero.
I'd like to build software projects that continue to not only exist in archives, but also continue to provide utility after I'm gone or have stopped working on them.
Two years ago I started work on a project called On Chain Cubes. It's a collection of Rubik's-like puzzle Cubes with their meta data stored entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. You can spin and solve them the same way you would do to one in real life.
There are UIs in a front end app that are written in React and deployed to Vercel. There's also a small server that turns the on chain numbers into pictures that are served on Opensea and other NFT platforms. These extensions of the project will one day probably shut down once the hosting service expires. But the cubes themselves will probably outlive me and everyone I love. As long as Ethereum is around, you will always be able to send a transaction to the on chain cubes contract instructing it to spin("R") for cube #219.
I'd like to build more like this. Projects more permanent than the ones on my hard drive, or funded by SaaS subscriptions, or archived in the arctic code vault. Later, when I'm dead or my mind has gone, a piece of me will live on through these forever projects in a way that was never possible before. I think that’s really cool.