bookstore-romeo

This is an incredible ressource without which I feel so many bikes and bike parts would go to waste. At the bike coop I volunteer at we’re trying to follow Sheldon’s footsteps by collecting information and procedures that are about making bikes & parts last for as long as they possibly can. What’s truly amazing is that all that documentation is amazing for both low-resource repairs on the cheapest of old parts and vintage part enthusiasts.

I think Sheldon Brown’s impact is a valuable lesson on sustainable engineering and the enormous role documentation plays in it

Something similar happened to a colleague of mine. He was in charge of his client’s website, which ran on servers from a company called Media Temple, which GoDaddy later acquired. A few years pass, and the account holder is completely out of the picture and not answering their email, and his authorization is needed to change the credit card which is set to expire soon. My colleague tries every support mechanism to regain access to the account (and it’s my colleague’s credit card on file) but support keeps asking for the long gone account holder’s authorization. When the card expired, GoDaddy wiped the servers and we lost the only copy of the site’s source. Sadly there were no backups anywhere. It was an account of 28 years. The site started in 1997. Over the summer it’s been my job to put a static site online made of the WayBack Machine’s snapshots (it’s a pain to scrape these snapshots for anyone wondering). Lesson learned: keep local backups, everyone!