i was working at the couchdb startup, cloudant. for reasons we wanted to keep some logfiles for a very long time for analysis purposes. the machines had limited disk so i started pushing them up to the then-brand-new AWS Glacier service, rumoured to be offline tape or optical media storage. Who knew when they wanted the data back? All they knew was they didn't want to lose it.

I stole time here and there for the project. I wanted to do a really good job. It was a tiny Python scrip. It couldn't have been more than a couple hundred lines. Boto didn't have Glacier support yet, so I used requests directly.

Every single thing I could error check and handle, I did. It was deployed and monitored using our Chef instance. I added all the error monitoring and recovery functionality to that recipe, too. I even automated updating its access token, should it fail, and recovering back to the exact point where uploads had last been successful.

I left the company, came back (as a manager), checked on it - still working! - and left again.

Many years later I got a message from one of the lead devs, something like "Hey, you remember that thing you wrote for uploading log files? We just turned it off. It was still running. There were petabytes of compressed logs in Glacier" and then some embarrassing praise I am too shy to share. Whenever I feel bad about my coding skills, I think about that little script.

It's fine to take pride in tiny things, to work through every possibility yourself, and to walk away from something knowing you did your best. Take your time. Fuck the man. Do it right. Feel good about it.

Make things that outlast you.