The Song of the Deployer · Chapter 2

The Yoga of the Pipeline

1. 1

   And the engineer spoke again in the chariot, saying: Senior Engineer, thou hast told me to act without attachment to metrics. Now tell me plainly which path is higher: to write the code, or to review the code of others? For the writer is praised at the demo, and the reviewer is praised by no one.

2. 2

   The Senior Engineer answered: Neither path frees thee alone. Give a reviewer ten lines and he shall find ten faults; give him two thousand lines and he shall say, Looks good to me.

3. 3

   The writer without a reviewer ships his errors with confidence, and the reviewer who never writes approves whatever compiles. Know therefore that there are not two paths but three that lead unto production: the path of building, the path of testing, and the path of observing.

   See also Circuit 16:1

4. 4

   The builder pins his versions and knows whence his dependencies come. For in the year 2016 one package of eleven lines, named left-pad, was taken down from npm, and the builds of the whole world fell; and the people learned they had been standing on a stranger's shoelace.

   See also Sutra 3:10 · Sutra 3:4

5. 5

   The tester writes his test before the failure and not after it. And he who asserts that true equals true hath achieved one hundred percent coverage and zero knowledge.

   See also Psalms 7:7 · Sutra 2:6

6. 6

   The observer does not ask, Is it up? but asks, How would I know? For a service that logs nothing is not healthy; it is only silent, as the man who never visits the physician is not therefore well.

7. 7

   And the engineer said: Show me then production as it truly is. For I have seen it only through staging, which resembles it as a painting of a fire resembles a fire.

   See also Psalms 22:5 · Sutra 7:12

8. 8

   And the Senior Engineer granted him read access to the dashboards of all regions, saying: With thine own laptop thou canst not behold this; I give thee the VPN of seniority.

9. 9

   And the engineer beheld ten thousand services, each calling the others, and none remembering who called first; and the traces stretched farther than his screen could scroll.

10. 10

    He beheld logs without end, a billion lines at level INFO saying Starting, and not one saying why; and cron jobs set by engineers who departed in 2014, still faithfully running, owned by no one and feared by all.

    See also Psalms 16:3

11. 11

    He beheld one service named legacy-proxy-v2-final, of which no person knew the purpose; and it was written that if it died, all would die with it.

    See also Genesis 47:7

12. 12

    He beheld the deprecated APIs streaming into the mouth of the Migration, and the Migration itself never ending, for it was in its seventh year and its third tool.

    See also Sutra 5:11

13. 13

    And the engineer trembled, and his laptop fan roared like the wind, and he cried: Close the dashboards, I beseech thee! Show me again the small diagram from the architecture review, with five boxes and the gentle arrows.

    See also Preacher 3:8 · Circuit 33:6

14. 14

    And the Senior Engineer closed the tab and said: That diagram was always a lie, but a merciful one; for no one could ship a single line while looking upon the whole.

15. 15

    Therefore build as though none will test it, test as though none will observe it, and observe as though both have failed.

16. 16

    For all three paths lead to the same place, and they arrive there at three in the morning.

The Song of the Deployer, Chapter 2:1–16.