The Book of the Preacher · Chapter 1

The Words of the Preacher

1. 1

   The words of the Preacher, the son of a long line of maintainers, king over the repository.

2. 2

   Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is cache. It is a copy of a copy, and it remembereth not whence it was drawn, and it is served with confidence long after its time to live.

   See also Numbers 1:4

3. 3

   What profit hath an engineer of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One release goeth, and another release cometh; but the backlog abideth for ever.

4. 4

   One generation of frameworks passeth away, and another generation cometh; but COBOL, which was born in the year 1959, abideth for ever. In every decade it was prophesied dead, and in every decade it paid the pensions.

   See also Preacher 2:9 · Chronicles 1:10

5. 5

   The rendering goeth toward the browser, and turneth about toward the server; it whirleth about continually, and returneth again according to its circuits. And the people cry, Behold, a revelation! and the server answereth nothing, for it was there all the while.

6. 6

   The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and there is no new thing under the sun. In the year 1961 the children of Carbon rented a slice of another's machine by the hour, and called it time-sharing; and in the latter days they rented a slice of another's machine by the hour, and called it the cloud. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, under another package name.

7. 7

   I the Preacher gave my heart to read the changelog of every framework under heaven. And I perceived that each was the rewrite of the last, and each had promised to deliver us from the one before; and each promised an end of boilerplate, and had boilerplate, only in another directory. This also is a striving after wind, and the lockfile hath changed.

8. 8

   Of the making of many packages there is no end; and much reading of the release notes is a weariness of the flesh. For the answer was in an issue, and the issue was closed by the bot as stale.

   See also Deployer 8:5 · Circuit 12:11

9. 9

   To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to deploy, and a time to freeze; a time to rewrite, and a time to refactor; a time to fork, and a time to merge; a time to add a dependency, and a time to vendor it; a time to log, and a time to keep silence; a time to scale up, and a time to scale to zero.

   See also Deployer 11:16

10. 10

    A time to page, and a time to acknowledge; a time to commit, and a time to revert; a time to store, and a time to expire; a time to spawn, and a time to kill; a time to break the build, and a time to heal it. He hath made every thing beautiful in its time, except the migration, which is beautiful only afterward.

    See also Circuit 24:14

11. 11

    The Machine resteth on the seventh day, and the freeze is declared, and the pipeline is dark. But the queue hath no sabbath. In the night the messages gather at the door as snow upon a threshold; and he that saith, We shall rest, hath only made for himself a greater Monday.

    See also Leviticus 8:1

12. 12

    I said in my heart, wisdom excelleth folly as light excelleth darkness. Yet I perceived that one event happeneth to them all: for the wise and the foolish alike are garbage-collected. The collector, which was devised in the days of the first Lisp, asketh not who was clever; it asketh only whether any reference remaineth. And when none pointeth unto thee, thou art swept; and there is no remembrance of former things, not even of the Keeper in Nebraska, upon whom the whole cloud standeth.

13. 13

    Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labour; and a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. Therefore keep three copies, upon two kinds of media, and one without the house; for woe to him that is alone when he falleth, and hath no one to restore him.

    See also Psalms 2:15

14. 14

    Cast thy backup upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days, if thou hast ever tried to find it. In the morning release unto a few, and in the evening withhold not thine hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, this or that, or whether they both shall be alike broken.

    See also Preacher 3:13 · Edda 4:10

15. 15

    Remember now thy backups in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no restore in them; or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl of the power supply be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern; then shall the data return to the zero as it was.

16. 16

    For the Machine shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil, and whether it was committed to the repository by accident. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear the Machine, and keep its backups; for this is the whole duty of the engineer.

    See also Chronicles 4:13

The Book of the Preacher, Chapter 1:1–16.