Bash script preamble

All background Bash scripts should start with this preamble:

set -euo pipefail exec > ~/log.log 2>&1

There are countless articles explaining why, and the main purpose of this one is a reminder for myself, so I won't go into the details. For reference:

• -e halts the script on error
• -u errors when using an undefined variable
• -o pipefail makes pipe error return value sane
• exec > ~/log.log 2>&1 redirect all output to ~/log.log

Where is the fun in that?

You can always find coders asking why coding isn't fun anymore. I can somewhat relate but I never understood why the answer isn't obvious: coding isn't software engineering. When you go from coding to engineering, the focus changes. A lot of the interesting stuff is there, but there's also not-interesting-stuff in the mix. Maybe testing and documenting isn't your thing, you just want to build something. Maybe the stability from testing and documenting isn't that important to you. Perhaps you know you're the only one who's ever going to read your code. Your future self may be angry at you for a little while if the code breaks... so what? Your experiment crashed? Just reboot it. No problem.

If you're coding-to-sell, you're not writing code for yourself. You write for a team, even if that team is only you and future-you. You write it so it may scale and adapt to new requirements. You write it to survive a bit more than a weekend, and to be stable. You're not writing code to learn new things, that's only a nice side-effect; you are trying to build a product.

Furthermore, you're not investing time to learn something or just to have fun; you're trading time for money (if you learn something in the process, that's good - but probably not why you're being paid a salary as a software engineer).

It's understandable that parts of software engineering are not as fun as it was hacking in a basement while you were a kid. There is still a very big overlap, but it's not just the same activity. Myself, I try to focus on the fun parts and just have discipline to get the boring parts out of the way. I usually work in places where the balance is fairly decent, and it's kept me interested in software development for the last 15 (ish) years. I'm hoping it'll do the trick for much longer than that.

reboot succesful?

 Since "migrating" from Wordpress to Blogspot:

• Traffic to Wordpress fell from ~100ish visitors a day to ~30 or ~40ish.
• This site went from 0 to also ~30 or ~40ish.

That went much better than I expected, considering I couldn't set up a proper HTTP301-permanently moved (WP charges you for that, which IMO is slight extortionate for a site I don't want to monetize). Let's see how it goes 10 years from now, when I have to migrate from Blogpost to something else.

sudo reboot

Recently found out Wordpress had pretty aggressive ads on my blog. That worked as the encouragement I was needing to work on a task I'd been putting off for years: fix bit-rotted content! I took the opportunity to fix all (most) broken links and source code snippets from the last 14 years. It was supposed to be a short sed script, which of course ended up being 3 days of work - a lot of it manual. A few cool things I figured doing this:

• Even if I very sparingly add new posts, 14 years is still a lot of content. By the infinite monkey theorem, some of it should be good. Right?
• A new reason to dislike template metaprogramming: so many 'template < class >', so much broken code...
• I have 400+ posts and less than 10 images. While I quite like adding visual content, very little of it (except memes!) survived the successive blog migrations.
• I can estimate there have been at least 3 platform migrations since the first post. I can count the number of times that '<' gets html-encoded like the rings of a tree. '&amp;amp;lt;' was the longest encode sequence I found.