The Jargon File, a compendium of hacker lore, defines “bit rot” as a jocular explanation for the degradation of a software program over time even

Against Bit Rot (Why & how I rebuilt my blog)

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Style Pass

2024-11-24 12:00:03

The Jargon File, a compendium of hacker lore, defines “bit rot” as a jocular explanation for the degradation of a software program over time even if “nothing has changed”; the idea behind this is almost as if the bits that make up the program were subject to radioactive decay.

The story started four years ago when I built my Gatsby-based blog. It was based on a “minimalist” template, and the result was beautiful right out of the box.

To this day, 99.9% of my changes were to the blog content written in Markdown. I didn’t touch the codebase because I didn’t need anything else.

As the number of content grew, I noticed the build started to get slower. Well, this goes with the territory, and I didn’t care much as I could easily preview my changes in my code editor. Builds only need to run on Github actions, and I didn’t care how long that took.

Fast-forward to two days ago: the last straw was that after a year or two, I couldn’t build my blog locally anymore. I was hit with numerous warnings and errors every time I tried.