1 Thou shalt love thy defaults.

Rainbows and emoji ZSH prompt? On servers? Fuck no. Your Ansible pull request has been terminated. Do less to do more stop dicking about.

2 Thou shalt use the infrastructure.

We both know you couldn't implement Paxos if your miserable life depended on it. Stop writing ridiculous code you won't understand in a week's time and put that shit in zookeeper, or a database, or DNS, or whatever.

3 Thou shalt use the OS.

If it'll fit in one line of grep | sed | awk, then do that. If you need more power, break out split and xargs -P. Use flock. Use cron. Use logrotate. Your slow, fragile, multi-threaded Ruby abomination are an affront to decency. Taco Bell that shit.

4 Thou shalt always check last mod times.

Are you sure that's the right file? Fuck me, are you even on the right host?

5 Thou shalt not blame DNS.

Despite what the Interwebs told you, it's not DNS. Stop using nslookup immediately. Use getent. Use dig.

6 Thou shalt respect the sanctity of stdout.

If your app has nothing to say, it should shut the fuck up. Logs do not belong on stdout. Ever. The Unix way is the righteous way.

7 Thou shalt automate everything.

Are you being paid by the keystroke or something? This isn't a union gig. Get that mind-numbing carpal-tunnel-inflaming shiteshow into Ansible. Now.

8 Thou shalt only use UTC.

Those VMs could be on the fucking moon for all I know. Don't make me convert your guess-the-timezone-not-quite-ISO timestamps during a outage. Not again.

9 Thou shalt cover thine ass

Record everything. Confirm decisions by email. Keep timelines during outages. Paper trails are your saviour.

10 Those who email screenshots of PuTTY sessions shall be destroyed.

What the actual fuck is wrong with you?