ugly code that works

 I had the thought, "ugly code that works", as I finished a PR today. Project isn't technically open sourced (YET!) so I can't say much more but man, I worked sooooo long and hard on this trivial problem that I needed to vent.

The solution to the problem was to do something in cloud-init. Do the same thing in a systemd unit. And all of that was just to work around a sysctl issue. The solution is ugly code that works (in particular as it has a sleep 180 embedded in a script.) There is no reason in the world that I should be writing a systemd unit that calls a two line script where one line is sleep 180. But, there was no way to get the sysctl working with a systemd.path unit. (I tried, repeatedly.)

And the code works. I also then (after getting a merge) googled, "ugly code that works", and saw someone has already written this blog (though thankfully it wasn't me this time). See: https://dev.to/tonetheman/ugly-code-that-works-4i7l

"Do not be afraid to write ugly code that works." Also, don't be too surprised if it does break. Ugly code can be fragile also.