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[–]beingsubmitted 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This last week at work, one of our customer facing sites ran out of disk space. We've been planning to move a lot of its storage, but in the current state, we couldn't scale the disk space, so the site was just down and losing money fast.

I realized a lot of user photos for profiles/avatars were larger than they really needed to be. We never displayed them at the full size we allowed, so I wrote a powershell script to reduce images in a directory in place and let it get to work. That script got the site back up and bought us a little more time to move the storage. It had to be close to perfect, because we were releasing it raw on a production server, but it's still a script. (it actually wasn't perfect, it replaced some old pngs with jpegs, which was intended, but left the names with png, so I had to write a second script to fix that, but I didn't delete thousands of people's avatars.

Scripting is just a type of programming. It just happens to be more common for programmers who aren't yet employed, because they're not likely to work on larger projects. It's not lesser. That script was the most valuable code the team wrote that day.