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by jfrisby
257 days ago
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Since this is HN, I'm gonna pick a nit. > A clever and witty bash script running on a unix server somewhere is also not utilitarian coding, no human ever directly benefited from it. Back around 2010, my friend Mat was doing cloud consulting. He wrote some code to screen-scrape the AWS billing and usage page for an account to determine how much had been spent day-over-day. This was, of course, all orchestrated via a bash script that iterated through clients and emailed the results to them (triggered by cron, of course). He realized he had startup on his hands when something broke and clients started emailing him asking where their email was. Cloudability was born out of that. I'd say that both the Ruby and bash code involved count as pretty utilitarian despite running on a server and not having a direct user interface. |
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Several years ago, I was the sysadmin/devops of an on-premises lab whose uplink to the rest of the company (and the proxy by extension) was melting under the CICD load.
When that became so unbearable that it escalated all the way to the top priority of my oversaturated backlog, I took thirty minutes from my hectic day to whip up a Git proxy/cache written in an hundred lines of Bash.
That single-handedly brought back the uplink from being pegged at the redline, cut down time spent cloning/pulling repositories in the CICD pipelines by over two-thirds and improved the workday of over 40 software developers.
That hackjob is still in production right now, years after I left that position. They tried to decommission it at some point thinking that the newly installed fiber uplink was up to the task, only to instantly run into GitHub rate limiting.
It's still load-bearing and strangely enough is the most reliable piece of software I've ever written. It's clever and witty, because it's both easy to understand and hard to come up with. The team would strongly disagree with the statement that they didn't directly benefit from it.