safetykit

Tags left in place in a powerplant after it was shut down, decommissioned, and abandoned. For some reason I’m a particularly cautious software engineer. It has its downsides, but one concrete benefit is that when I slip (everyone does), those slips are less likely to cause an incident. Over time I’ve seen slips contribute to many serious incidents, and have come to properly value the role of straightforward safety mechanisms in tools. The most obvious and commonly used mechanism is --dry-run, but there are many more safety mechanisms you can introduce into a semi-automated system. I’ve made a small Python gist called safetykit to collect these mechanisms. It is a set of runnable demonstrations that advance a simple idea: production scripts should have seatbelts. The gist exists to make common safety techniques concrete. Instead of saying “be careful with destructive scripts”, it shows a few ways a script can slow down, explain itself, ask for help, recover from interruption, and leave…