Just got a call late on a Friday afternoon from someone whose website was suddenly throwing critical errors. It’s a nice site with generally decent-looking custom code, correctly added in a separate plugin.
That said, the original dev now lives out of state and has changed careers. So the owners got hold of me through a friend-of-a-friend referral.
Once I got server access I could see the error log, which let me quickly identify the problem: a piece of custom code that made a deprecated function call. Luckily, the whole feature, an email address obfuscator, isn’t really necessary in the 2020s, so I was able to comment out the whole thing with no consequences.
But the question remains: if you write custom code, how responsible are you for it? If you use functions with potential deprecation warnings or a JS library that goes dark, what’s your obligation to the original client? Especially if you’ve moved on to another job or even another career?
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