> The idea with Bear is to refine the existing features to the point of perfection, instead of building new features or pushing monetisation.<p>I love this. I wish more software was built with limited scope. Not every application needs to grow larger and change forever.
> there is a process in place to hand over the project to a trusted party in the worst case scenario.<p>Sorry for being a pedant, but it's hard to overstate how insignificant this timeframe is compared to "forever". Even if we talk about forever in practical terms of when the earth will be consumed by the sun or something like that. Why not just be honest and say "<i>Built to last a lifetime</i>"?
Side note: Proud to see more and more South African techies and their work becoming regularly visible on HN (other recent notable example includes Fynbos).<p>Keep it up Herman!
The article is titled “Building <i>software</i> to last forever”, but the software is probably the least interesting part of making it endure (though it’s still important, for the reasons outlined in the article). Making the <i>service</i> last, that’s the tougher part.<p>For my part, I move ever more determinedly in the direction of self-hosting and actively avoiding becoming a single entity that can fail and take lots of people down with me—avoiding most of the scope of this article becoming applicable.
I have to say nothing to date has the charm of late 90's, early 00's internet but I'll admit bearblog comes close. I'm glad more people than just me appreciate simple websites.<p>If anyone has links for their personal sites/blogs, or anything in the vein of software development, feel free to share. I'm eager to build a bookmark folder of them to check in lieu of social media or youtube.
I've been following this project for a while and I love it. The only drawback I see is that writing maths equations is not easy. In my blog I use Mathjax, but I guess this is not possible in Bear because they want to do all the heavy processing server-side, and rendering LaTeX on server side using Mathjax is not trivial. Hopefully they'll find a solution to this issue, since I think a lot of people would then migrate their technical blogs to Bear.
If you liked this post, you'll also like his post titled:<p>My Product is my Garden
<a href="https://herman.bearblog.dev/my-product-is-my-garden/" rel="nofollow">https://herman.bearblog.dev/my-product-is-my-garden/</a><p>I've sent it to many friends over the years.
A less stringent requirement would be to "build for longevity" and part of that could be planning for the end. Because things do end and that isn't always bad.