Riding for Roses

I invented a new word today: “lamous”. It is a combination of “lame” and “famous” and means “becoming (mildly) famous for doing something completely lame”. While bored out of my skull one day, I finally finished the words to “I Code Alone” my parody of George Thorogood’s “I Drink Alone”. I used to threaten my employees at Impart Technology that anyone caught coding alone had to sing the song.

I am now lamous because Andy Hunt noticed my posting to the PragProgWiki that included the lyrics and posted to his blog – I now know why I had a small bump in page hits starting October 8.

So, the history of the song. Once, there was a company called Terrace Mountain Systems. Through fluke of good work, political relations, and health problems for one of the early employees, I wound up the Director of Engineering and Chief Architect (I hated, and still hate, both of those titles, but that’s another story). I hired a team with the intent of following Extreme Programming. I hired people I knew, or knew through trusted contacts, and we actually did most of the development practices of Extreme Programming. We had ongoing challenges doing as much pair programming as I wanted us to do. Thus began the threats. I said that anyone who wanted to code alone could do so as long as they sang the song “I Code Alone” the entire time they were coding alone.

Wandering about the PragProgWiki one day last month while bored out of my skull and trapped at a computer (yet another story), I was reading about pair programming (specifically, a wiki entry on the oxymoron “pair programming alone”) and decided to finish and post the lyrics so others could suffer from them as Brad, Deborah, and Eric did.

Reposted here to share the pain; with apologies to George Thorogood:

I Code Alone
(To the tune of “I Drink Alone” by George Thorogood)

I code alone, yeah
With nobody else
I code alone, yeah
With nobody else
You know when I code alone
I prefer to be by myself

Every morning just before breakfast
I don’t want no pair with me
Just me and good buddy emacs
That’s all I ever need
‘Cause I code alone, yeah
With nobody else
Yeah, you know when I code alone
I prefer to be by myself

The other night I laid sleeping
And I woke from a terrible dream
So I caught up my pal Eclipse
And his partner JavaBeans
And we coded alone, yeah
With nobody else
Yeah, you know when I code alone
I prefer to be by myself

The other day I got invited to a party
But I stayed home instead
Just me and my pal J2EE
With those awesome EJBs
And we coded alone, yeah
With nobody else
Yeah, you know when I code alone
I prefer to be by myself

My whole family done give up on me
And it makes me feel all alone
The only one who will hang out with me
Is my J2ME phone
And we code alone, yeah
With nobody else
Yeah, you know when I code alone
I prefer to be by myself