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Have you ever drive? Think so. All of us are drivers. People drive cars, bikes, projects, production, business and even life.

Do you remember how you became a driver? This was exciting isn’t it? The feeling that you got the power and make a first step in your life, say a first word, pass your first exam, earn your first money, make a car move, write your first line of code, deploy your first production server is unforgettable. This is feeling of beaten uncertain.

You start with the small foot steps and with the help of the trainer over you. Your parents help you when you start to walk or talk, instructor teach you to drive the car, teacher open for you knowledge, more mature developers ensure that you are doing right with your job.

And after several successful (or not successful attempts) you became a professional, you know how to drive and not think any more about the way to switch from the low gear and driving became a routine. Hm… But there are still so many things that you can’t to drive.

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Team is a very powerful mechanism… Of course there are lot of individuals who may impress with the knowledge, speed, productivity, but team is a different, team mechanism operated by many rules, it is like locomotive always move forward, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but goal unavoidable will be reached. Individuals like bikers, they are fast, flexible, can show amazing tricks but there are too much roads for them, and too few of this roads lead to success.

So most powerful individual can’t do anything against the Team. Nature has a lot of examples of this. Are you imaging crocodile, he is the real monster, he is powerful, merciless, he is a king of his territory, but recently I found a picture where only 3 dogs (this is already a team), each of them 10 times weaker then crocodile, have done the monster, and monster fall a prey. Blood is growing cold with terror from the view of this hell hounds. I haven’t attach this picture directly, but if you want you may look on it here.

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Last year I am doing lots of code review, QA and work very close to production. Maybe the most destructive patter I saw during this competition was implemented in the following script:


cd ~/temp
find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -ctime +5 -exec rm {} \;


This script looks quite simple, isn’t it? It deletes some temporary files, which are older then 5 days, really simple, but… with one condition, when ~/temp folder missed because of any reason (NFS share wasn’t mounted or local drive failed or user hasn’t enough rights) this script will delete innocent files in the working directory (in case of cron this more probably will be the user home).

So always define a FULL path in the command which is select files for delete, not rely that the command above change the directory for it and you will not use this pattern.

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