Halloween is getting close. How do I know? Not because its highlighted on my calendar. And not from the constant temptation of walking past the three mega-sized bags of candy I purchased for the ghostly event. I gauge the proximity of Halloween by the frequency of Michael Jackson’s Thriller being played on the radio. “What’s a radio?” all the millennials ask while they try on their Deadpool costumes. Sorry, no time for this Gen-Xer to explain because the witching hour is almost upon us and my Superman costume no longer fits.
Back to the song Thriller. I’m not sure which is greater: the number of times I’ve heard this song or the collective number of bite-sized Tootsie Rolls I devoured throughout all my trick-or-treating years. But here’s where it gets eerie. Right after hearing Thriller for the seventh time this week, I had a conversation with one of my developer-friends and he was telling me about a recent VB6 haunting. Not only did his story give me the heebie-jeebies, but it gave Thriller’s opening lyrics a spooky new twist during my eighth listen.
“It’s close to midnight 
Something evil’s lurking from the dark
Under the moonlight
You see a sight that almost stops your heart
You try to scream
But terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze
As horror looks you right between your eyes
You’re paralyzed”
We all have legacy technology choices that lurk in the dark, just waiting to rear its ugly head and make us want to scream. We selected these once vibrant, surefire technologies because they were supposed to live forever. Instead, they’ve become members of the walking dead. When we need to maintain applications written with these technologies, the fear can be quite paralyzing.
If hauntings from technologies past are keeping you up at night, you need to consider a low-code development platform. They help you get a good night’s sleep because they shield you from all the scary underpinnings of building and deploying modern applications and remain focused on the task at hand – making sure your users are happy. The last thing you want is to be surrounded by a mob of angry users, waving their torches and pitchforks, complaining that you’re not providing them with the applications that they need to be successful.
Most low-code platforms take care of making technology choices for you and, more importantly, constantly keep up-to-date with current technology trends so you don’t have to. They provide a quick escape route from legacy with a simple recompile and you’re back up up-to-date again with no more scary monsters hiding under your desk.
The alternative is to encircle your cubicle with salt and wearing cloves of garlic around your neck to fight off the ghosts of technologies past.
I’d love to hear some of your personal horror stories of dealing with old, scary technologies in the comments below.
Have a Happy Halloween everyone!
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