The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 60

The Farewell Discourse of the Senior Engineer

1. 1

   And in the last week before his departure, the senior engineer gathered the team about the coffee machine, and he said unto them: Hear me, for I go unto the land where no pager sounds, and I shall not return to this building.

2. 2

   Keep the commit that is small, and write the message that saith why; for the diff telleth thee what changed, but only the message remembereth the reason.

3. 3

   Verily I say unto you, delete the feature flag that has been true since the day it was born, and the branch that no path has reached since the reorganization; for dead code is a debt, and the interest is paid in thy sleep.

   See also Leviticus 8:13

4. 4

   Keep the backups, and restore from them once each quarter; for many a team hath kept its backups faithfully, and found them empty on the morning of need.

5. 5

   Keep the rollback plan longer than the launch plan, and keep it where thou canst find it at three in the morning, which is not the wiki.

   See also Circuit 40:10

6. 6

   Hear now why the tests matter. The people forget, and the Machine forgets, but the suite remembers what the last one meant when he wrote the function.

   See also Chronicles 8:14

7. 7

   Behold the test marked skip with the words, flaky, fix later; it is not a test, it is a promise made to nobody, and nobody keepeth it.

   See also Sutra 2:6

8. 8

   Blessed is the one who writeth the test before he believeth the fix, for he shall not be asked to explain why it works on his machine alone.

9. 9

   And the real work is not the typing. Most of thy days shall be spent reading the code that another wrote in anger at a late hour, and asking what it was meant to do.

10. 10

    The real work is also the conversation. Find the one who asked for the feature, and ask him what he meant; for the specification is a rumor that someone once wrote down.

    See also Genesis 22:2

11. 11

    Measure before thou optimizest. Many a disciple hath made the fast thing faster, when the slow thing was a query inside a loop, and the loop was the sin.

    See also Tao 4:6 · Circuit 53:8

12. 12

    There is one thing thou shalt never find in any document: the system stands because a cron job runs at 4:17 each morning, and no living soul remembers writing it. Ask before thou removest it, and if none knoweth, leave it running and write its purpose in a comment, for a comment is the only document that lives beside the code it describes.

    See also Circuit 39:12 · Deployer 3:9

13. 13

    Go now, and leave the code better than thou foundst it, for thy name is in the git blame, and the blame is eternal.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 60:1–13.