On Building Things That Last

There is a particular kind of satisfaction in building something that outlasts its moment. Not the flashy launch, not the spike of attention, but the quiet persistence of a thing that continues to work, continues to serve, long after you've moved on to other problems.

Most of what we build in technology is ephemeral by design. We ship fast, iterate faster, and deprecate without ceremony. This is often the right approach—the cost of permanence is usually too high, and the world changes too quickly to justify it.

But occasionally, you encounter something that was built to last. A piece of infrastructure so thoughtfully designed that it handles edge cases its creators never imagined. An API so well-considered that it remains stable through a decade of changes around it. A system architecture that bends without breaking.

The cost of durability

Building for longevity requires a different kind of investment. It demands that you think not just about what the system needs to do today, but about the forces that will act upon it over time. User behavior shifts. Dependencies evolve. The organization around it restructures.

The temptation is always to optimize for the present. Ship now, fix later. But "later" has a way of never arriving, and technical debt compounds with interest.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

This doesn't mean over-engineering. The systems that last are often remarkably simple—simple enough to be understood, maintained, and extended by people who weren't there when they were built. Complexity is the enemy of durability.

What remains

I've been thinking about what separates the things that last from the things that don't. It's rarely raw technical excellence, though that helps. It's more often a quality of thoughtfulness—evidence that someone considered not just the immediate problem, but its context, its edges, its future.

The products I admire most carry this quality. You can feel the intention behind them. Every decision seems purposeful, even the small ones. Especially the small ones.

This is what I aspire to in my own work. Not permanence for its own sake, but the discipline of building as if it matters. Because it does.