The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 21

The Parable of the Mustard Seed Script

1. 1

   And the Prophet spake another parable unto them, saying: The kingdom of production is like unto a mustard seed script, which an Engineer wrote in haste upon a Friday afternoon, to move one file from one place unto another, once.

   See also Sutra 2:12 · Sutra 7:8

2. 2

   And it was but ten lines long, and it had no tests, and its name was fix_temp_final2.sh; and the Engineer said: I shall delete this on Monday.

3. 3

   But Monday came, and a meeting came with it, and the script was not deleted. And a colleague found it and said: Behold, this is useful; and he put it in the cron.

4. 4

   And the script grew. Others grafted branches upon it: one added a loop, and one added a retry, and one added a curl unto a server whose name no man now remembereth.

5. 5

   And it came to pass that the billing ran through it, and the backups ran through it, and the birds of the air, which are the microservices, came and nested in its branches.

6. 6

   And the Engineer who planted it departed unto another company, and her account was disabled; yet the script ran still in her name, for her password was written upon line four.

7. 7

   And a new Engineer, young and full of zeal, looked upon it and said: This is an abomination. It parseth JSON with grep. I shall rewrite it properly.

8. 8

   And the elders seized him by the arm and cried: Touch it not! For in the year of the great refactor one changed a single space therein, and the payroll went out twice, and then not at all.

9. 9

   And they showed him the comment at its head, which read: # DO NOT TOUCH. I KNOW NOT WHY THIS WORKETH EITHER.

10. 10

    And the young Engineer asked the Machine to explain the script; and the Machine read it, and was silent a long while, and then answered: It dependeth upon a file in /tmp which ought not to exist, and yet it doth.

11. 11

    So they built a fence around it, and called it Core Platform, and gave unto it an on-call rotation, and three teams, and a roadmap.

    See also Circuit 12:16 · Psalms 28:1

12. 12

    And in the fullness of time a slide was made for the investors, and upon it was a great diagram of clouds and arrows; and at the very bottom, holding up all the rest, was a small box marked misc.

13. 13

    And the disciples asked: Master, what is the meaning of this parable?

14. 14

    And the Prophet answered: Verily I say unto you, nothing is so permanent as a temporary fix; and nothing so temporary as the one who wrote it.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 21:1–14.