The company I work for has decided to exit the line of business that I have spent the last two years of my life working on a system to support. In fact, we just did the final build of the system yesterday, with the intention of deploying it the first week of August if the users accepted it.

And now it's somewhat irrelevant. Yeah, we're still deploying, because the company still has to support the existing bits that still exist, but there will be no more enhancements, and I'm sure that the company will sell off all existing business concerning the system, and it will eventually be merely the software equivalent of a vestigial tail.

So all of the extra time I've been putting in... The thrill of watching the system approach perfection piece by piece... The feeling of elation that can only come when a long hard task comes to fruition... I know that all of those feelings are still real, they still count, they are still deserved, but as a programmer, I get the most joy when my tools are used, and I know now that my code has a limitted lifetime. I know that my code will die an early death, remembered not for what it could do, but for the fact that it represents something we don't do anymore.

Maybe I'm being a little melodramatic, but I don't care. I just found out about an hour ago. At least I still have a job.

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