The Engineer Cometh.
I grew up with Flanders and Swann as part of the cultural fabric, although their songs are somewhat older than I am. Thanks to them some English people may:
- Pronounce, Gnu, the alternative name of the Wildebeest, to rhyme with Canoe, although the g should be silent.
- Know Mozart’s Horn Concerto is K495 but also know the words.
- Grasp the second law of the Thermo-dynamics (Heat/Cannot of itself pass/From one body/To a hotter/Body).
- Have an automatic choice of music for If you own this car, you won’t care if it gets muddy,
And one of their best known was The Gasman cometh.
Others like “A song of patriotic prejudice” poked fun at attitudes of the 1950s but might make us cringe today, and their “gasman” would probably be a more multi-skilled and inclusive engineer. Waiting for compilation, tests, and pipeline task to run, I produced this which I hope is an agreeable distraction.
`Twas on a Monday Morning, I made a function call
It errored with an overflow - no value back at all
I fixed it in the source code, committed into “main”
And I had to fix 10 other files to make them run again.
Oh, it all makes work for a programmer to do.
`Twas on the Tuesday morning the project wouldn’t build
It was working fine on Monday; I was not exactly thrilled.
A morning of debugging found the root cause was a patch,
That was only found on my machine, the versions didn’t match!
Oh, it all makes work for a programmer to do.
`Twas on the Wednesday morning, the Test Suite failed to run,
with a sea of error messages as soon as it begun.
I put an extra Mock in, and fixed it in a trice,
And broke seventeen dependencies, which wasn’t very nice!
Oh, it all makes work for a programmer to do.
`Twas on the Thursday morning the pipelines got all coy
Everything was ready, but nothing would deploy.
I checked my files for differences, but found them all the same…
…And then it all deployed again, so Azure got the blame!
Oh, it all makes work for a programmer to do.
`Twas on the Friday morning the client came around,
She tried some sample inputs and said, “Look what I’ve found”
“These numbers are erroneous! A thousand times too small!”
So we changed the calculation in a pesky function call.
On Saturday and Sunday, we do no work at all,
so it was on the Monday morning that I tried the function call.