An Ode to JavaOne

With JavaOne coming up next week, I thought this little tribute might be approriate.

The Coder

To the tune of 'The Gambler', by Kenny Rogers

On a warm summers evenin', on a plane bound for nowhere,
I met up with the coder; we were both too tired to sleep
So we took turns a surfin' techie website on our laptops
til boredom overtook us, and he began to speak

He said, son, I've made a life out of Java Server Faces
Of Hibernate and POJOs, of webapps portalized
So if you don't mind my sayin', you've made a mess of those use cases
If you let me use your keyboard, Ill give you some advice

So I handed him my keyboard, and he asked about my project
Then he flicked through my classes, and asked for some insight
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression
Said, if you're gonna cut the code, boy, ya gotta learn to cut it right

You got to know when to mock 'em, know when to code 'em
Know when to unit test, and know when to scrum
You never count your stories till you've done your iteration
There'll be time enough for counting when the sprint is done

Now every coder knows that the secret to survivin'
Is keepin' your code agile, and keepin' your code clean
Cause requierments are a changin', and those change requests are coming
And the best that you can hope for is to keep the users keen

So when he'd finished speakin', he passed me back the keyboard
Taught me to refactor, JUnit and TDD
Continuous Integration, testing annotations,
And how to measure progress by results that you can see.

You got to know when to mock em, know when to code em
Know when to unit test, and know when to scrum
Don't you go believing that requirements are frozen
Even the users, they won't know 'em till the sprint is done

You got to know when to mock em, know when to code em
Know when to unit test, and know when to scrum
Don't get caught up read Dilbert when your doing pair programming
There'll be time enough for Dilbert when the sprint is done

So now you can go vote for yours truly in the New Zealand IT Rockstar competition ;-).

John is a freelance consultant specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, John helps organisations to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes. John is principal consultant at Wakaleo Consulting, and runs several Training Courses on open source Java development tools and best practices. John is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 65 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.