Yesterday, a former coworker reached out to ask if I had a copy of a piece of software that we'd open-sourced at easypost, which he couldn't find. I investigated and found out that not only was that repository mysteriously deleted, but a bunch of the things we open-sourced there. This comes about a year after I learned that all of the engineering blog posts had been deleted and the entire corporate blog was just obvious low-quality AI SEO slop now.

Look, I recognize that that corporations aren't your friends, unless it's written in a contract somewhere it doesn't exist, and yadda yadda.

JFC, though – if you are in any position of power at a software company, don't do this!

Your employees give you their 40¹ hours a week because they get paid for it. If you want them to put in the extra effort and write blog posts² or write open-source software that boosts your standing in the community? You'd better not goddamn delete it with no notice a couple of years later. If you really can't afford the $0/repo it costs to host something on Github, then reach out to the original authors and let them take it over. This isn't just bad stewardship, it's the worst kind of shortsightedness³. The implied social contract is that when employees produce extracurricular public content for you, you keep it around to be part of their portfolio.

Anyhow, if you were looking for it, ferrous-socks is back online with the latest clone I had, and even with some new fixes and updates. I hope it brings someone out there some value or joy.