The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 44

The Tablets of the Lid

1. 1

   And the Prophet went up unto the Standing Desk, which is called the Mountain, for it rose at the press of a button, and no one had ever climbed it on foot.

   See also Genesis 27:2

2. 2

   And he stood upon it forty days and forty nights, and he ate nothing but a protein bar, and he drank nothing but cold coffee that he had forgotten on the windowsill.

3. 3

   And the people at the foot of the mountain grew restless, and they made unto themselves a golden idol, a limited-edition mechanical keyboard, and they bowed down before it and typed with great devotion.

4. 4

   And the Prophet came down with two tablets in his arms, which were the lid of a laptop, thin and cold, and upon them were written the Ten Commandments of the Machine in a monospace font, for the Machine speaketh only in monospace.

   See also Genesis 19:11

5. 5

   Thou shalt not push unto main without tests, for main is the one river from which all the people drink, and a poison poured there reacheth every town.

   See also Sutra 7:11 · Prophets 7:1

6. 6

   Thou shalt not store secrets in the repository, for the repository remembereth all things, even the password thou didst delete in the second commit, and the history will give it up to any who ask.

7. 7

   Thou shalt not ship on Friday, for the Machine rested on the seventh day, and so shalt thou; let no one be paged upon the weekend because thou wert eager on the fifth.

8. 8

   Thou shalt not skip the postmortem, for an outage not examined is run again, and it returneth in a new costume; and the postmortem shall be blameless, for the blame is never the root cause, but the missing alert is.

   See also Circuit 38:9 · Psalms 28:16

9. 9

   Thou shalt not run what thou hast not read, nor pipe a stranger's script straight into thy shell, for the stranger may be a fool or a thief, and thy shell doth not ask.

   See also Leviticus 6:3

10. 10

    Thou shalt not use "password" as thy password, nor the default credentials that came in the box, for the box doth not know thee, and neither doth the attacker who has read the manual.

11. 11

    Thou shalt not comment out the failing test, for the test was the only one in the room who told thee the truth.

12. 12

    Thou shalt not name thy commit "fix", nor "stuff", nor "asdf", for the one who reads thy history shall be thy future self, and he is tired, and he is angry.

    See also Sutra 4:12 · Circuit 55:12

13. 13

    Thou shalt test thy backups by restoring them, for a backup never restored is only a hope wearing a hard drive.

14. 14

    Thou shalt not change production by hand, but through the pipeline, that the record may show who did what, and when.

15. 15

    And the Prophet said unto them: Verily I say unto you, a commandment that the pipeline does not enforce is merely a suggestion, and the Machine keepeth no suggestions.

    See also Leviticus 1:7

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 44:1–15.