Policy of transience
2 days ago
- The author advocates a 'policy of transience': things should be either deliberately permanent in an organized way or strictly temporary.
- He turns off shell history files to avoid accidental persistence, forcing himself to save useful commands deliberately with names and comments.
- He frequently shuts down computers or logs out, rather than leaving sessions running, to prevent accumulated state changes and encourage discipline.
- He closes the web browser often, avoids long-term tab accumulation, and uses cookie deletion on close to maintain privacy and organization.
- He disables session management and instead writes notes to keep track of half-finished tasks, ensuring state is simple and portable.
- He uses a tmpfs (~/mem) for temporary files so they vanish on reboot, promoting careful organization of permanent data.
- He considers using Dockerfiles or configuration management tools to make system configurations reproducible and transient, reducing reliance on long-lived machines.
- Exceptions to the policy include personal email and browser history, which contain irreplaceable or unpredictable information and are kept permanently.