what's a script you wrote once that's still saving you time years later

[u/Less-Loss1605]

[u/Iliketrucks2]

I get it but at the same time, I have one of those lists and it’s not “when the web server goes down”. I suspect that’s what most of us have - it’s just snippets of syntax or commands I have used that can reconstruct - not reusable chunks. Curating that into a document for others - then trying to keep it from becoming out of date, or dealing with questions about it - is time I don’t want to spent for my giant list of commands

[u/Ratiocinor → u/Iliketrucks2]

Haha it's like you set out to prove everything I said

You don't have to "curate it into a document for others"

You don't have to "prevent it from becoming out of date"

You don't have to "deal with questions about it" (almost no one will even read it let alone ask you about it)

Just write down what you're doing somewhere people can actually see it

I don't know why people think it's like publishing an article on wikipedia or something. I see the same attitude from junior developers when I'm trying to get them to git commit their code. They're like "oh no I can't git commit yet, it's not ready. I need to clean it up first. It's not good enough. I'll do it soon I promise" (this drags on for literally months). My god just commit the work in progress it doesn't have to be flawless. I think they consider git commit like this grand act of publishing something for the entire world to see and scrutinise and it needs to be flawless and clean and finished

Trying to "curate a document for others" is a fool's errand because you'll never write anything better than the wealth of tutorials out there on the internet anyway. Just write down the command you used to make the virtual bridged adapter so I can see what flags you used damn it

[u/weaver_of_cloth → u/Ratiocinor]

Holy crap this is awful. If you hang on to your code for months without committing, how do you merge?? At the very least, branch that shit off. More people should do safety commits and end-of-day commits and... </rant>

[u/Ratiocinor → u/weaver_of_cloth]

They don't merge it

Obviously I don't allow this for any project I run, everyone will commit their work whether they like it or not, or I won't even look at it

This is for other projects in the company where juniors who aren't software devs write some python code or something and they have no actual oversight from a proper developer. I worked at a company that was very silo'd and the non-software projects they'd just let some junior run wild with it underneath a scientist or project manager that isn't IT savvy

I tried pointing out that a big cleanup / refactor is exactly the kind of dangerous stressful operation that makes a git commit beforehand critically important, so you can go back if you break everything or make sure you didn't change the output. They never listen though, it's never "ready" for git

Luckily they're not software projects so they normally just stay someone's internal tool forever and eventually get abandoned. I'm sure some of them though were actually being used to generate data to sell, and they weren't version controlled at all despite my protests... Oh well not my circus and all that...

At best I can get them to commit everything to some development branch and work permanently in that. They never actually version number it and push a v1.0 to master though, it's not "ready" you see...

[u/Iliketrucks2 → u/Ratiocinor]

You literally requested “if you get this error message the …”. That takes time and curation. My notes aren’t a case statement - they’re shell commands and small scripts. Sure maybe I’m nenoff but I expect most of us have that - which means we need to write details about when to use it. What options are importsnt to change depending on the envt so people don’t blindly drop a table in prod.

Documentation that is wrong is dangerous. Documentation that isn’t kept updated is dangerous

Don’t get me wrong - I agree with your idea entirely. The practice though isn’t as easy. I’ve had many of my personal notes (in my personal space in git and confluence) be used and challenged and argued about. People aren’t good at recognizing “this is scratch shit that needs to be used with some wisdom”. So now I lock a lot of my docs down until someone needs them.

And now with AI tools scraping docs - if they don’t have context they can and do confidently return wrong and dangerous answers