Maintaining a monument

Last week we took our semi-regular trip to the Uffington White Horse, a 3000 year old horse carved into the chalk of a hillside somewhere between Swindon and Oxford. The horse is maintained by the National Trust, and each year they get a series of volunteer groups to come and help with the maintenance; we attend as part of the Long Now London cohort. Perhaps it was the atypical heat getting to my brain, but whilst sat on the hill, trading in my keyboard for a trowel, I felt there were a good number of parallels to my time maintaining data-science pipelines, and possibly more broadly to software maintenance in general. This post is an attempt to collect those thoughts to see if they form any sort of cohesive comparison, or were just a sign I should have worn more sunscreen. Constant maintenance required Although we tend to think of geological features as being somewhat slow to change, the Uffington White Horse takes constant maintenance. Andy, the lead guide from the National Trust,…