Welcome to this edition of Ctrl+Alt+Deploy 🚀
I’m Lauro Müller and super happy to have you around 🙂 Let’s dive in right away!
In the previous article of this series, we focused on the foundations of reliability when writing Python code. You learned to handle errors gracefully, log with purpose, externalize configuration, and think about testing. Your scripts are no longer fragile, one-shot “magic”: they are robust; they are dependable.
While this is already a huge step in your growth, we now need to start thinking about the next level. And when we work in teams, the next level doesn’t necessarily mean more complex scripts; but rather, scripts that others feel comfortable around and can reliably work with. If you’re the only person on your team who understands how to run your code, debug it, or modify it, your brilliant script has just become a new piece of technical debt. You’ve successfully climbed out of the "it works on my machine" hole only to fall into the "it only works on my machine" trap.
The next stage of your growth is about moving from a solo contributor to a team player. It's about writing code that doesn’t just solve a problem but empowers your colleagues. This is how you start building a reputation not just as someone who writes good scripts, but as an engineer who builds valuable, lasting tools.
The Mindset Shift: From Solving Problems to Solving Classes of Problems
A junior engineer is often tasked with a very specific problem: "Write a script that cleans up the log files in the /var/log directory on server X." They go off, write a 50-line script with a hardcoded path, and the problem is solved. At least for now.
A more experienced engineer hears the same request but thinks differently. They ask, "Are there other servers where we need to clean logs? Are there other directories? What happens when the retention policy changes from 30 days to 60? How can I build something that solves the log-cleanup problem, not just this one instance of it?" And perhaps even more importantly, “How can I avoid overengineering my script and find a balance between solving today’s problem while ensuring the script can be easily extended to tackle tomorrow’s challenges?”
This is the leap from writing a script to engineering a tool. It's the difference between a disposable solution and a reusable asset. Your goal is no longer just to make your own life easier, but to build something that makes the entire team more effective. Every skill that follows is a building block for this mindset.
Want to learn real-world Python skills?
In my Python for DevOps course, we focus on going beyond Python fundamentals and learning critical features and skills for implementing robust real-world Python projects and scripts. From decorators and generators all the way to implementing a fully-fledged CI/CD pipeline to publish Python projects, it covers many important aspects of working with Python. Want to bring your skills to the next level? Then make sure to check it out!