“Anything which can be automated, should be.”

There’s always more projects and not enough time to handle them all. The less work we have to do on tasks that can be automated, the more time we have for the rest of it.

You should never, ever just generate a temporary file name, unless you’re going to write into a secure directory. A secure directory is one that no one else can write into (except root) and the same holds for all parent directories (or the sticky bit is set). Otherwise, you open yourself up to race attacks.

Temporary filenames in sticky directories (e.g., /tmp) are only safe to use as long as the file itself exists. Once the file is gone, the name isn’t usable either. Suitably paranoid code would check that the directory is sticky before creating the file and using the name.

In general, all of this means you should write code that never looks at, or cares about, the name of a temporary file. If you care about the name, you must be very careful. In those cases, it’s probably easiest to securely create a temporary directory, then create the files in there.

This code:
“mkstemp(dir=os.path.join(gettempdir(), ‘myscratchfiles’))“ is insecure because someone else could make myscratchfiles into a symlink. It could be used to write a temporary file into an attacker controlled place, which opens you to attack if you reuse the filename (i.e., close the descriptor and open the same name again). Likewise, your last paragraph is only safe because you use mkstemp and not one of the other functions.

The simplest way to ensure temporary files and directories get cleaned up is to just use tempfile.TemporaryFile where appropriate, or a context manager when not appropriate. If you’re finding management of temporary files difficult, then you’re most likely structuring your code incorrectly.

class cdinto(object):
def __enter__(…)
-> create the temp dir
def __exit__(…)
-> remove the leftovers

and wrapping the main with:
with cdinto() as tmp:
main()

Much easier;)

Basically, like any question of language, it is primarily a question of context. Would the title make sense to use with people who are professional game developers by trade? Probably not (though, as I mentioned, I think there are plenty of vague titles we use without batting an eyelash—I think I’d be hard pressed to not put my understanding of “game designer” into the same category as your “development director”). If I’m out of “Lead Developer” or “Programmer” business cards though, and I’m feeling lazy, then I’ll probably be “Development Director” or something like that, mostly because of the uselessness of titles in my situation generally (I’m not trying to apply for jobs, for instance). I’m pretty sure I’ve had dumber titles printed on my GDC badge before ;)

Probably, your “Development Director” is called different by other people…

1. Project Manager Assistant, who was in charge of checking the routine like plans/reports and responsible for proper meeting organization (agenda, fup, checks of was actually done after the meeting)

2. Production Lead, who was responsible for creating|managing the art production (both internal team and external outsource individuals and studios) including synchronization with programmers and designers

I do sometimes need a module level initialization function, if the class being used as a singleton requires some sort of configuration to be provided by the library user though.