The Code You Don't Write

Act without doing, work without effort.
Think of the small as large and the few as many.
Confront the difficult while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task by a series of small steps.
    - Lao-Tze

Sometimes, the code you don't write is more important than the one you write.
Whenever I start on a new task, my first question is "how can I do this without coding?".

Here's a small (true) exmaple:

We had a problem that serving files on an NFS mounted volume was slow for the first request and them it was good. Probably the mount went "stale" after a while.

First option of learning the inner working of NFS mounts was dropped immediately - you can never know how much time this tinkering will take and if it'll work eventually.

So I decided to keep the NFS mount "warm" by periodically accessing it.

First Version:

from time import sleep
from os import listdir

while 1:
    listdir("/path/to/nfs")
    sleep(10 * 60 * 60)

and in crontab

@reboot /usr/bin/python /path/to/script.py

Then I thought - "cron", and second version came:

from os import listdir

listdir("/path/to/nfs")</code></pre>

and in crontab:

*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/python /path/to/script.py

And then last version (just crontab):

*/10 * * * * /bin/ls /path/to/nfs

So down from 6 LOC to 3 LOC to 1 LOC - that's what I call produtivity :)