One of the downsides of a career in software is that it’s actually pretty rare for anything you write to last more than a few years. Hardware goes obsolete, operating systems get upgraded, apps and companies fall out of favor, domains expire, standards change. Our entire professional world is… ephemeral.

So it’s nice to occasionally see something you’ve created live on… at least for a little while.

I left Facebook in January, 2015. That was seven, almost eight years ago. While there, one of the problems I noticed was that when it came to gathering log and metrics data in the browser and sending that back to the server, every engineering team had their own ad-hoc solution. There was a proliferation of largely redundant code that tended to be bug-prone, difficult to audit, and inefficient. Lots of unnecessary network traffic, which is a pretty big deal at Facebook Scale™.

My solution was a unified data pipeline I called “Banzai” (as in “Banzai Pipeline”. Get it? It’s a surfer thing.) It was a single API that teams could stick data into at one end (the browser), and have data come out the other (their DB tables), and it worked well. It ended up working well and I managed to convince most of the engineering teams to switch over to it. There were a few outliers, but by and large it was a success. I put a pin in it, left Facebook, and have moved on.

Except every once in a while, like this morning, I’ll crack open the network tab in my browser’s developer tools, just to see if Banzai is still there, still being used. This is a silly thing, a small vanity of mine, I admit. But knowing my code, my ideas, carry value and meaning after my existence somewhere has passed helps validate what I do.