Small, dependable scripts

Patrick Duboy published a blog post on "cold-blooded software", in which he notes:

A cold-blooded project is like the baby painted turtle. You can freeze it for a year and then pick it back up right where you left off.

A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.

I love small, dependable scripts that solve a specific problem. These scripts can run in the background, or be used ad hoc when needed.

I have a task at work that involves ingesting blog posts, parsing the titles, and ingesting them from one content management system to another. This script enables showing related blog posts to content on another website. For this task, I wrote a small script. The script is small, but dependable. It saves me hours of work.

The script uses RSS to retrieve information about each blog post. Then, the script uses the API from another content management system to upload the content. There is no specific cadence for running this script, other than our knowing we have significant new content that we want to appear on our main website.

My script for copying metadata about blog posts from one platform to another is in a folder whose code I have not changed in months. I know the setup routine by heart. I need to change the filter to decide what content to upload, then the content is uploaded.

I have small automated scripts that run for various personal tasks, too. For example, I have scripts that:

• Poll the Hacker News API and send me a Webmention (a type of site-to-site notification that says your site was linked to one site) when my domain name comes up. This notification shows up in my feed reader.
• Generates an index for my website.
• Turns a CSV file of coffee shop reviews into the format my website needs.

These scripts haven't changed since I wrote them, and I have no plans to change them. They work just as I like. It is satisfying when you have solved a problem with software and know that there is little left with which you can tinker. Amongst all the large projects that require constant maintenance, these small scripts stand out. Dependable scripts are like an old friend: always there when you need them, ready to help, and a reminder of the joy you had when you forged that friendship.