If you do it more than once, write a script...

There's a saying often used by Unix System Administrators: if you're going to do it more than once, write code to do it for you. For the last few days, I've been writing code to handle clan equipment automatically, so I don't have to be involved.

This has been a very time-consuming process, so much so that you might be tempted to ask, "if it's going to take so long, why not just do it by hand?" And indeed, that's tempting.

But one of the things that has occurred to me writing this code is that clan equipment is simply a complex process. Every single line of code I've written reflects some check, some detail that I would have had to remember and check manually. Each of these details is important. And the odds of me remembering them all when I do it by hand are near zero.

In short, while doing it by hand would definitely be faster in the short term, it's basically guaranteed to be wrong. And I've got direct proof of this while I'm looking at the existing clan items - they're spread out across the vnum ranges completely at random, built and set up in different ways by different builders, with some of them violating various constraints and some not. It's a complete mess.

That is what 15 years of doing it manually looks like, and that's why I'm not going to allow it to be done manually anymore. I am replacing myself with a (not so short) set of scripts. I'm ok with that, because those scripts will do a better job than I would have.