Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky actually has a role described as "programmer archaeologist":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky#Interstel...

That is, btw, an absolutely fantastic distant future sci-fi novel. Among the best of all time. (Vinge doesn't consistently product books that good, but man that one is great.)

Just bought it because that premise sounds amazing. Amazon has it listed as "Zones of Thought series Book 2". Should I read book 1 before reading this?

Maybe, but I don't think you necessarily need to. I started with A Deepness in the Sky and then read the other two (and then all the other books Vinge has written).

Especially since it is actually a prequel, I don't think the order is that important.

There are things in Deepness that will have more significance if you've read A Fire upon the Deep, but nothing central to the plot. They're both standalone novels, just in the same setting/universe/background.

A great book, full of interesting ideas and implications of software development carried on over millennia.

Testing the waters, I'd played with the idea of a story with basically this setup:

Two new developers start at a company/startup, and are brought in to do a six-month sprint to fix a stalled/broken product after the development team becomes unavailable because reasons. So, they're dropped into a codebase and are trying to pull everything together.

However, as they work through into deeper and deeper parts of the system, the commit messages and comments get more and more cryptic and unsettling, hinting at the reasons for the prior team's dissolution, the business forces that caused that to happen, and maybe something worse/better going on outside.

I'm really lazy though. :(

>after the development team becomes unavailable because reasons.

Every member of the programming team was attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.

And they said it couldn't happen...

I like it. It reminds me of something like System Shock (2 is the one I played), where you learn about what happened on this ship before it was overrun by mutants from journals and such. Instead of a book, this may work well as a game of some sort. Perhaps even text-based?

This is a really good idea. Too bad I seriously suck at writing fiction or I'd pick this up.

In Vernor Vinge's Deepness In The Sky, there really are code archeologists, as it's often simpler to find programs than to write them from scratch.

They believe that the Unix epoch (since extended many times over) dates to the moon landing (approximately correct), since the exact historical explanation has been lost.

When I say "code archeology", I mean the equivalent of "git blame" without assigning blame - just finding out why stuff is the way it is and not who's responsible because that would be totally pointless, especially years after the incident.

I do like your spin however :-)

Oh yeah, I knew your meaning. Doing blame and bisect to find a deep-seated bug can be a lot of fun... or frustrating and miserable. I tend to give terrible on word commit messages when I'm developing, but I always do an interactive rebase to clean things up and make a reasonable view of history. We use Phabricator a lot too, which does a great job of letting you annotate code, commits etc.

Praise is a built-in alias for SVN, not so for git unfortunately.

Ditto in Bazaar, which copied SVN. But there's an easy fix:

  git config --global alias.praise blame

Ken Macleod's books have a some of this kind of stuff in them - people having to maintain old space stations that run Oracle DB's and stuff like that.

Candy Crush Saga on git? Sounds more like a fantasy novel.

Heh, the twist is that he discovers the secret, which is that Candy Crush is really a giant conspiracy to cull the feeble. He decides not to fix anything.

Maybe not once it becomes an ancient relic: https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do

I'm pretty sure Sony has already optioned this plot and trying to get Tom Cruise for Biff.