Rewrite or not rewrite

When I first read Joel on "Things You Should Never Do", I thought that though he's mostly right, there are things that can be argued.. It was long ago and forgotten, until recently I've read "Why rewriting code can be startup suicide" article by Steve Blank and it reminded me of that matter. So here are my 2 cents.

In a perfectly designed world—one with no history—we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Neil Shubin

"Your inner fish"

GAE, cookies and everything

The reason I'm posting this is because I think the solution we found could be useful for others.. So here's the story.

Some time ago we were trying using Google App Engine to create some king of a web-crawler. And pretty soon we have found that doing HTTP requests to other sites with GAE is not a piece of cake. It's more like a piece of something less tasty...