Friday funny: Code Monkey
I was talking to a CIO yesterday about how hard it is to relate to “IT people”. I think by “IT people” the CIO meant developers. Personally, I enjoy relating to developers and prefer their company to other species of IT people such as project management, sales and marketing. I think I’m half-geek — unable to gracefully code but deeply in awe of those who do.
Today I’m deeply in awe of American singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton (I’m probably the last person in the world to discover him, sorry, I’m just not that cool).
Jonathan is geeky enough to have worked as a software developer for a few years and he releases songs about geeky subjects like writing code, Benoit Mandelbrot, Robot Santa Claus, bacteria and DNA. His fans maintain a healthy and extensive wiki on the man and his music. He releases his songs (regular and karaoke versions) in high bit-rate MP3 and FLAC formats and all of them are available under a Creative Commons license.
And of course, he’s @jonathancoulton on Twitter. Yes, he’s geeky.
Coulton nicely expresses the challenges of being a geek in a corporation in his song Code Monkey. Here’s a lyric sample:
“…Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not “functional” or “elegant”
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login page himself…”
This is geek life; the internal dialogue of the frustrated programmer and his daily struggle to find inspiration and creativity in menial software development. Here’s a great Machinima video clip for Code Monkey which combines coding and World Of Warcraft. FTW!
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
