There is definitely an art to writing scripts that don’t suck. It isn’t enough to just get the job done. It’s everything to make your script do the right thing, with messages, with errors, and over time (like years from when it was written). 1. Always use absolute paths for everything. You cannot assume what your environment will be. You can’t. If your script executes via cron it’s likely it won’t have any of the environment variables you depend on. Including PATH. Or HOME. The working directory will probably not be what you expect, either, so don’t write to files in the directory you’re in without thinking about it. Especially if you’re running as root. You’ll actually have permission to …

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“Hello?” “Hi, this is boss-of-developer. Sorry, I got your number from one of the other managers. Where are you?” “I’m about to be in my office.” “Stay there.” An extraordinarily short amount of time passes. “Hey, what’s up with you and my staff?” “Um, they’re kinda off the reservation and I want to help them but they think they need stuff like 100% uptime, huge machines, etc. and they totally don’t. I believe in the cause, I just want to add some of my own wisdom so that things are better for everybody down the road. And if they need big hardware we can always scale up, and do so very easily. I think they missed my point.” “Yeah… they …

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So I spent the morning conversing with my favorite developer, via email. It went something like this: “We need PHP 5.1.2, Apache 2.2.0, Java 1.4.1, and MySQL 5.0. We also require a four CPU machine and 8 GB of RAM.” “I counter with PHP 4.3.9, Apache 2.0.52, Java 1.4.2 or Java 1.5.0, and MySQL 4.1.12, and a virtual machine until we can tell what exactly you need.” “You are being obstructionist. Please give us what we ask for.” “Actually, I don’t think my services will fit your needs. You might explore some other options. Go talk to our Windows techs.” “We need this to run on Linux. Please help me. The Windows guys sent us to you originally.” (ooh, they’re …

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Done right, a standard is helpful. You can rely on it, make assumptions using it, and get things done faster. Done wrong and it’ll be the square peg that has to fit into the round hole. The idea of a standard is that you minimize the variations you’ll encounter. You might have to embrace certain variations, though, in order for your standard to be useful, and therefore popular. Take the spork. You know, a spoon with mini fork-like tines at the end, popular at Taco Bell. It is a miserable fork, and a crappy spoon, because it tries too hard to be more efficient. Take the bathroom. You could have one standard, the toilet, for both men and women. Or …

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