The constant refrains of IT

knoxg | July 9, 2021 | Meta | No Comments

During the course of any given day as a software engineer, there’s the constant novelty of grappling with the issue du jour, but there’s also the repetitive performing of the same tasks you did the day before to solve those problems.

And some time after you’ve celebrated pushing your 100,000th commit to your git repository, you’re going to start humming the chorus to ‘Push it‘ to yourself whilst watching the progress bar for a push that sits on 90% for 90% of the time. And if you’re alternating those pushes with pulls to get the latest source code, then you better believe you’re going to start humming ‘row, row, row your boat‘ whilst that’s happening. Not out loud though. That would be weird.

This post is an incomplete list of all those little ditties that are going to be burnt into your brain after a decade or two of doing this.

Track: Push It
Activity: pushing a file to git

Track: War (what is it good for)
Activity: waiting for your webapp archive (.war) to build

Track: Theme from Rawhide (the rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ bit)
Activity: rolling a release to PRD. or rolling it back. Or basically any time I’m waiting for things to load, if you replace rollin’ with loadin’.

Track: Proud Mary (the rollin on the river bit )
Activity: as above.

Track: Remember me
Activity: having to reselect the ‘remember me’ checkbox when logging in

Track: Whip it (devo)
Activity: marking an MR as work in progress (WIP)

Track: That’s just the way it is
Activity: trying to comprehend someone else’s code that you have no intention of rewriting

Track: And that’s the way it is
Activity: as above (alternate)

Track: Thunderbird
Activity: Thunderbird

Track: Nacho man (simpsons)
Activity: logging into nagios

Track: History (never repeats)
Activity: spelunking through the history tables to find out why something went pear-shaped

Track: Bring it back
Activity: undeleting that thing you just deleted

Track: Paperback writer
Activity: working on the PptxWriter class

I had a larger list of these things, but they start getting associated with different pieces of code which you, dear reader, will thankfully never have to deal with. Could probably come up with one for each unix command-line utility. Let’s do that.

Track: Still haven’t found what I’m looking for (U2)
Activity: find

Track: heard it through the grep vine (how much longer)
Activity: grep

Track: shebangs
Activity: any shell script that starts with a shebang ( ‘#!‘ )

Track: smooth operator
Activity: ls
you know, because it’s a directory listing.
and you used to have to talk to a telephone operator to get directory listings.

Although those are a bit contrived.

I’m probably showing my age with these song selections, I’m guessing the millenials of tomorrow will be humming Your Power whilst they turn things off and on again.

Further mentions: