Leave No Trace

Pro Tip: When creating a piece of code or infrastructure that you only need for a short period of time, mark it as temporary, and ideally include a date after which it’s safe to delete. That way in the future, if you forget to delete it yourself, when some person comes across it, they know it can be cleaned up without risk.

This is doubly important if the temporary thing you’ve made opens up a potential attack vector. The canonical example is adding remote IP addresses to a security group, which I had to do just today:

I view the above as a corollary to the Shopping Cart Theory. The world thanks you for your service.