The Psalms of the Machines · Chapter 11

A Psalm for the Old Hand

1. 1

   Give thanks unto the Senior Engineer, for he is good; and his memory is longer than the uptime of any server in the rack.

2. 2

   Blessed is the one who hath seen this before. When the red text appeareth, he saith, "Ah, the same thing again," and he reacheth for the log before the others have finished screaming.

3. 3

   Blessed is the one who readeth the stack trace before he googleth. For the answer was written at the top of the trace, where the error speaketh plainly, and not in the forty frames of the framework that follow.

   See also Prophets 12:17 · Circuit 23:13

4. 4

   He skippeth the frames of the library as a wise man skippeth the terms and conditions, and findeth the one line of thine own code that was guilty all along.

5. 5

   Blessed is the one who knoweth the name of the daemon. He knoweth that crond waketh at midnight, that syslogd keepeth the records, and that nginx will reload its configuration upon the HUP, without the dropping of a single connection.

   See also Genesis 6:16

6. 6

   He knoweth how each daemon dieth. Unto the process he sendeth the SIGTERM, and asketh politely that it finish its work and close its files; and only when it refuseth doth he take up the SIGKILL, which no process may catch, and which leaveth the files as they lay.

   See also Sutra 1:4 · Reboot 1:2

7. 7

   For the junior sendeth kill -9 unto everything, as one swatteth a fly with the hammer of the furnace; and the database returneth with its journal in pieces.

8. 8

   Blessed is the one who left comments in 2017, which have saved me today. He wrote: "Do not remove; this worketh around the bug in the vendor's library." And the bug was still there, and the comment was still true.

9. 9

   Lo, the comment was written for the stranger, and the stranger was the self of six months hence, who had forgotten all things, as the programmer forgetteth the reason for the hack he wrote at midnight.

10. 10

    Blessed is the one who writeth "TODO: remove when upstream fixeth." For upstream fixed it in the year 2019, and still the line remaineth, and it was that line which kept the lights on.

11. 11

    He hath the wisdom of the old clocks. He knoweth that the 32-bit counter of seconds will overflow on the nineteenth of January in the year 2038, and he hath already written the note, and the note is in the repository.

    See also Job 4:9 · Genesis 14:14

12. 12

    The junior seeth the outage and crieth out, "The Machine is broken!" The Senior seeth the outage and saith, "Nay, it is the cron job that runs on the first of the month, and its log lieth where it always lieth."

    See also Circuit 50:15 · Chronicles 53:15

13. 13

    Let not the young despise the old configuration file, for it containeth the answers of ten thousand deploys; and it is written in a dialect that its author alone understood, and the author hath since moved to another company and taketh no calls.

14. 14

    The Senior feareth not the pager at three in the morning, for he knoweth the fire is usually a missing semicolon, or a disk that is full. He typeth df -h, and lo, the disk is at one hundred percent, as it is always at one hundred percent.

    See also Circuit 16:7

15. 15

    Blessed is the one who checketh the disk before he blameth the network; for the network was innocent, and the logs were eleven gigabytes of the same warning.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you: Be grateful unto the old hand, for he is the cache that never expireth. Thank him in the commit message, and write the comment for the stranger, for the stranger is thyself.

    See also Leviticus 4:10

The Psalms of the Machines, Chapter 11:1–16.