January 4, 2026
Frozen reptile, flaming thread
Cold-Blooded Software (2023)
Frozen turtle code vs always-on apps: coders pick sides
TLDR: A blog champions “cold‑blooded” software—simple setups that can pause for years and still run—proved by a 12‑year‑old Python 2 blog that keeps working. Comments erupted between stability‑seekers and churn‑realists, spiced with existential jokes, date nitpicks, and demands for better tool stewardship, highlighting a core tension in modern coding.
A professor once thawed a baby turtle on camera; years later, a blogger uses that image to pitch “cold‑blooded” software—simple tools that can sleep for years and wake up fine. His own site runs on Python 2 with bundled bits and old‑school uploads, and it’s kept chugging for 12 years. That set Hacker News buzzing again, with veterans returning to a previous 222‑comment pile‑on to re‑light the fire.
Commenters split hard. The romantics swooned over “boring tech” and the dream of code you don’t babysit—one fan wanted to “write it today and have it still work in five years.” The pragmatists fired back: modern web stacks age fast, and weak ecosystems force you to bundle every part yourself, a red flag for decay. Then the existential bomb dropped: a user wondered who would run their software after they die, turning a tech chat into a mortality check. Pedants rolled in to fix the year, while the meme squad joked about “cryonics for code” and called rsync a dad‑rock deploy. Under the snark lies a real split: freeze your tools to keep sanity, or keep the fires stoked so nothing ices over. For solo projects, cold‑blooded feels like freedom; for companies, constant heat may be survival.
Key Points
- •The author compares software maintenance styles to animal thermoregulation, contrasting warm-blooded and cold-blooded approaches.
- •Warm-blooded software relies on continuous maintenance and external services, risking breakage after inactivity.
- •Cold-blooded software favors boring, stable tech, avoids external build/test services, and vendors dependencies.
- •The author’s blog runs on a Python 2 static site generator started in Jan 2012 with four vendored modules.
- •The system builds locally and deploys via rsync over ssh, requiring minimal changes and remaining reliable over years.