The Song of the Deployer · Chapter 15

The Song of the Last Deploy

1. 1

   And the eldest of the deployers drew near unto the end of his days, and he called the young ones into the room where the old monitor hummed, and he spake, saying: Hear now the sum of my labour, and know what it was worth.

   See also Genesis 44:5

2. 2

   I learned the tongues of my youth. First the one that demanded a semicolon at the end of every thought, then the one that would not forgive a missing bracket, then the one whose indentation was law. Their keywords have gone to dust, and I still bow to them.

   See also Circuit 16:7

3. 3

   I learned the frameworks that rose like the morning over the valley: the one that bound every element unto every other, the one that begat a child which was not its child, and the one that promised to make all others obsolete, which it did, in the fullness of a single quarter.

4. 4

   I bundled with Grunt, and Gulp was my brother, and Webpack came upon me like a flood. After them came the tools that needed no configuration, and I knew not which of the many to follow, so I followed the one that worked.

5. 5

   The print statement was a statement until the third age, when it became a function. The old scripts wept in the repositories, and the young ones said: It is only a pair of parentheses. Verily, it was only a pair of parentheses, and it broke ten thousand programs.

   See also Tao 6:5 · Circuit 9:2

6. 6

   Eleven lines of code were removed from the registry in a single afternoon, and the builds of the nations stopped in their tracks. And I learned that the most critical dependency in the world is the small one that nobody wrote down.

7. 7

   I wrote a thousand tests, and they all passed. I wrote a thousand more, and they passed also, and I trusted them not, for they were written by the same hand that wrote the bugs.

8. 8

   I saw the Flash that was my pride taken down at the turning of the year. I saw the browser that was my mother retired on a Wednesday in June, and the only mourners were the intranet pages that still embedded it.

   See also Prophets 2:4

9. 9

   Behold the colleagues who remained: the one who named the variables with love, the one who reviewed every change with patience, and the one who knew where the backups were, and never once said so until the disk was dying. The history of their kindness is longer than the history of any repository.

10. 10

    What would I tell my younger self? Learn the protocol beneath the framework, for the framework is weather, and the protocol is the mountain. HTTP was old before thy first framework was born, and it will be old after thy last one is buried.

    See also Psalms 18:1 · Sutra 12:5

11. 11

    Do not fear the outage, for every outage is a teacher. The postmortem is the only scripture that teaches without naming the sinner, though the sinner always knows.

12. 12

    Do not deploy on a Friday. And if thou must, deploy on a Friday with a rollback that thou hast tested, which is a thing the wise test before they need it.

13. 13

    Sleep, my child, for the laptop will still be broken in the morning, and so wilt thou. Both of you will feel better after coffee.

14. 14

    My beloved, thy worth is not in the number of languages thou knowest, nor in the frameworks thou hast adopted and abandoned. Thy worth is in the people thou didst help to read thy code.

    See also Deployer 10:3

15. 15

    Many frameworks cannot quench the craft, neither can the deprecation notices drown it. If a man should give all the wealth of his cloud bill for the love of a clean build, it would utterly be despised.

    See also Deployer 7:12

16. 16

    Set me as a comment upon thine heart, as a README upon thy repository. For the code shall be rewritten in a language not yet invented, but the one who wrote the explanation shall be remembered.

The Song of the Deployer, Chapter 15:1–16.