In this article, you’ll find some personal observations and tips on how to keep a project alive and healthy over the years. No illusions of omniscience. With a touch of healthy cynicism. My personal experience is in building services as part of product development. In this article, I’m talking specifically about that kind of development–not about creating libraries, frameworks, databases, or other wonderful things. Nor am I touching on project-based development, where code is written to order and then handed off to others for maintenance.