Another insightful gem from Rafe Colburn on taking a quick “hack” and getting the result into a production system:
Why write this up? It’s to point out that for most projects, getting something to work is just a small, small part of building a production service. Exporting a CSV file from a database query and uploading it to an FTP server takes just a few minutes. Converting that into a service that runs within the standard infrastructure, and handles failure conditions smoothly takes hours.
Echoes of the challenge of building capabilities.
Also, I’ve learned through hard won experience, don’t trust the environment cron provides your script at all. Make everything as explicit as possible. Even then it’s a difficult debugging process. Good luck!