busybee fluffy rambles

I wasn’t a fan of OS/2 myself but I appreciated how much of a community there was around it and how excited people were to continue to use it. When I took it over the website was an unmaintainable mess and the file structure was inconsistent and weird and the community around it was dying, so I decided to redo the whole thing from the ground up. At the time, PHP wasn’t really a thing and even CGI was still fairly new, so I used this as an opportunity to learn how to do dynamic websites and I built my own (shitty, in hindsight) CGI framework for C++ and my own bespoke database system and custom tooling to manage it all.

Funnily enough, the current website design is pretty much how I remember leaving it way back in the 90s, although at some point another student must have replaced my C++ code with something PHP-based, and presumably also went with a more typical database engine as well.

I’ve never relied on Hobbes myself, but this whole thing occupies a nostalgic spot for me just because of how formative it was in my (very) early career as a software engineer, and the impact I had on a large community in running it.

This feels like the end of an era and I’m sad to see it go, as surprised as I am that it’s continued to run for all these years.

Looks like a lot of other people are going to miss it too.