Post
'Twas the night of the moratorium, and all through the cloud
not a pager was beeping: no deploys were allowed.
The packages frozen on the servers with care,
In hopes that an outage would strike nowhere;
The developers still pondering code to embed,
While visions of monads danced in their heads.
The VM put to sleep, and I in this app,
Had just settled down for a long masto thread,
When out of the machine room there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bean bag to see what was the matter.
Away to the laptop I flew like a flash,
logged into the jumpbox, starting my bash,
The lights on the servers blinking all red
Gave the lustre of multiple threads all locked dead
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a banged up crash cart, with eight cans of beer
With a little old hacker, so focused, resolute,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Root.
More rapidly typed spells I've never seen
And he whistled, and shouted, and cursed at the screen:
"Ugh, DOCKER! Now, TRACEROUTE! Now, KTRACE and TRUSS!
On, PYTHON! On PERL! No RUBY or RUST!
Process loops fork! I'll have to killall(1)!
Now bash - away! bash away! Warn users with wall(1)!"
The zombie processes with their parent now killed
were reaped by init(8), as Ken Thompson willed;
So out of the process table they flew,
freeing up cycles and memory space, too.
And then, in a twinkling, the tcpdumps showed,
with buffer caches flushed, connections now flowed!
As I mirrored the ports and tailed the log file,
I heard St. Root run down the hot aisle.
He was covered in cables, from head to his foot,
patched 'em in switchports, he doubled throughput!
He opened his laptop, his terminal: no hype.
No Electron, no XCode, only in 'vi' did he type.
His code -- so readable! His Makefiles how clean!
His scripts were well structured, his includes pristine!
His CFLAGS? Warn 'all', warn 'extra', be extra pedantic
Turn warnings to errors, it's almost romantic!
A grep(1) to a pipe, then awk(1) into tee(1)
A fifo(1), two filters, into subshells three;
He balanced a beer on his little round belly
That shook as he typed like a bowlful of jelly.
He found the core dump, dissecting the ELF
And he laughed when he noticed his mumbling himself:
"A tweak of the registers, a few bit flips I see,"
he patched the binary, now using ed(1).
BT Free is a non-profit organization founded by @ozoned@btfree.social . It's goal is for digital privacy rights, advocacy and consulting. This goal will be attained by hosting open platforms to allow others to seamlessly join the Fediverse on moderated instances or by helping others join the Fediverse.
