Last night I talked with a former colleague from intes.net (which is now part of another company) and he mentioned that a web-based contact management system I wrote was still being used every day. It’s a custom Perl CGI/MySQL application from five years ago, from before I knew much about application frameworks, loose coupling, separating concerns, templating systems, making things simple and so on. To be honest if I had to make changes to the system today I’d nuke the whole thing and port the data to one or two OpenInteract packages. The framework it’s built on is that ugly. And of course I feel that if I knew then what I know now I could have conquered the world :-)
Still, it's pretty cool that people continue to use it and that there are no maintenance or performance problems. He mentioned one workaround they have to do to include in a search companies with no associated people and people with no associated companies (associate each with a dummy record) and I laughed -- people always find a way around the barriers systems stick in front of them.