Write the code well once, the spec stops bothering you (opens in new tab)

I wrote a Java class twenty years ago that assembled tar archives on the fly. It ran for fifteen years. In that fifteen years, nobody touched it. Not me, not anyone else. This is a story about why. The hundred storefronts and the one carrier spec In the mid-2000s, I was running a content distribution platform. Over a hundred storefronts plugged into it. Bookstores, label-branded stores, carrier-branded stores. Each one resold the same underlying content — books, comics, music, video, and more...