Once more commit the branch, dear nerds, once more;
Or close the regression up with our Developers patch.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a dev
As modest comment and load testing:
But when the blast of deadline blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the hacker;
Brew up the coffee, summon up the bits,
Disguise right design pattern with with hard-learn’d workaround;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let land them unto the indented plains of code;
In act of thought and consideration let the brow o’erwhelm eye
As fearfully as doth a zero-day
O’erhang and jutty his confounded server,
Swill’d with the APT and wasteful DDOS.
Now settle the PHP and set mind to closures,
Hold hard the breath and drink up every Americano
To his full height. On, on, you noblest Developers.
Whose bits are fet from fathers of hack-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Torvalds,
Have in these architectures from morn till even coded
And commited their code for lack of bugs:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d forebearer did inspire you.
Be copy now to dev’s of n00ber bits,
And teach them how to code. And you, logic yeoman,
Whose toolchains were made in GPL, show us here
The Turing-completenes of your langauge; let us swear
That you are worth your learning; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble hoisting in your code.
I see you callback like javascript in the node,
Straining upon the hardware. The projects afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘FSM for Matsumoto, Reenskaug, and Saint Schwarts!’

By me, Lee Hilton

As a second labour he ordered him to debug the MVC Framework. That software, bred in the swamp of GitHub, used to go forth into the net and ravage both the user and the developer. Now the framework had a huge body, with nine forks, eight refactored, but the middle one untouched. So cloning a repo driven by Tower, he came to GitHub, and having finished his clone, he discovered the framework on a remote beside the branches of the Maintainer, where was its den.

By pelting it with unit tests he forced it to come out, and in the act of doing so he xdebug’d and set breakpoints. But the framework wound itself about one of his tests and clung to him. Nor could he effect anything by squashing it’s forks with his generics, for as fast as one fork came to the help of the framework by break another feature. So he rewrote it, and in his turn called for help on Trexor who, by setting standards for structure and API attacked roots of the forks with the extensibility, prevented them from sprouting.

Having thus got the better of the sprouting forks, he chopped off the untouched HEAD, and buried it, and put a heavy rock on it, beside the remote that leads through GitHub to Followers. But the body of the framework he slit up and added it’s functions to his Gist. However, Lerdorf said that this refactor should not be reckoned among the ten because he had not got the better of the framework by himself, but with the help of Trexor.

By me, Lee Hilton

I have a buffer sync with Disk
At some disputed cached object,
When UPDATE comes with data changed
And tuple sets fill the block—
I have a buffer sync with Disk
When UPDATE brings back new INT and CHAR.

It may be he shall take my CRUD
And write me into his dark platter
And close my trans and lock my tables—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a buffer sync with Disk
On some sub-element of a record,
When UPDATE comes round again this cycle
And the first LONGBLOB records appear.

KERNEL knows ‘twere better to be deep
Abstracted in DAL and ORM,
Where data streams out in blissful brook,
Read nigh to read, and write to write,
Where hushed reindexing is dear…
But I’ve a buffer sync with Disk
At midnight in some flaming RAID,
When UPDATE trips triggers again this cycle,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that buffer sync.

By me, Lee Hilton

So we parsed on in the direction of the return true, Instancing of classes of which it is well to /dev/null, Although it was well to instance them at the time.

We breakpointed a the declaration of a great foreach, Encircled seven times by lofty recursion, And around which there flowed a pleasant stream;

We went over the stream as on static output; And I called seven functions with those wise men: We breakpointed into a switch where the case was cool.

And there were nerds whose eyes were bloodshot and tired, Of great authority in their beardiness: They were not trolls and their man pages were complete.

We cd’d away a little to one side, To an ../../, up high in the tree, So that I could find . the whole repo easily.

There, straight in front of me, on a black background, There were presented to me those green characters, Merely to have seen whom is an exhaltation.

By me, Lee Hilton

And on the 8th day, FSM looked down on his codebase and said, “I need a caretaker.” So FSM made a coder.

FSM said, “I need somebody willing to get up before noon, triage the tickets, work all day in the branch, triage the tickets again, eat hot pockets and then go to Portland and stay past midnight at a meetup of the Node devs.” So FSM made a coder.

“I need somebody with skin thick enough to manage StackExchange and yet kind enough to turn a n00b into a pro. Somebody to call meetings, tame cantankerous machinery, come to the office, have to wait for lunch until his boss is done feeding visiting VC’s and tell the investors to be sure and come back real soon — and mean it.” So FSM made a coder.

FSM said, “I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn app. And watch it die. Then dry his eyes and say, ‘Maybe next commit.’ I need somebody who can shape a SOAP call from an inferred schema, patch a server with a floppy disk, who can make harness out of spare wire, sugru and hot glue. And who, launch time and deployment week, will finish his forty-hour week by Tuesday noon, then, pain’n from ‘hacker back,’ put in another seventy-two hours.” So FSM made a coder.

FSM had to have somebody willing to read the specs at double speed to get the build in ahead of the investor crowd and yet stop in mid-regex and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a dangerously wrong Stack answer. So FSM made a coder.

FSM said, “I need somebody strong enough to design api’s and write frameworks, yet gentle enough to tame customers and wean users and tend the new hires and interns, who will stop his editor for an hour to restore a downed site from backup for a nonprofit. It had to be somebody who’d design it right and true and not cut corners. Somebody to repro, refactor, respec, merge and fork and inherit and instance and compile and make the package and reload the config and flush the caches and finish a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to a LUG.

“Somebody who’d build a team together with the soft strong bonds of GPL’ing, who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his intern says he wants to spend his life ‘doing what Sr. Dev does.’” So FSM made a coder.

By me, Lee Hilton