Tuesday, July 5, 2011

What does Code Monkey mean?

This is a fan-made video for the Jonathan Coulton song "Code Monkey"....



(Update: replaced original low budget fan video with an anime style fan video).

A code monkey is someone who writes code, who loves to write code, eat cheetos, and drinks mountain dew. There are some substitutions possible here. Some days I might prefer Hickory Sticks, or Coke. However, a code monkey is clearly not a "Boring Manager Rob".

A "Boring Manager Rob" is someone who is interested more in metrics, and gantt-charts and burndown rates, and moving 30,000 bugs from one bug-tracking database to another one. A Code Monkey, in my view, would rather quit than stop doing what he likes to do, which is build beautiful code, elegant applications, and polished usable software products that end users love using. Or maybe, if you're Jonathan Coulton, you'll quit your dead-end junior software job, working for Boring Manager Rob, and become an independant geek troubadour. Since my guitar playing is definitely not up to scratch, I think I'll keep writing code, and let JoCo write songs about writing code.

The term Code Monkey is usually applied to Junior Programmers, and that can only be used in an ironic sense in my case. I've been writing software in Pascal (and then Delphi) since 1989, and I started writing Commodore 64 basic and assembly language in 1984, and so I'm not exactly a junior programmer any more. I'm pretty gray, but what I really like doing is writing code. I have managed teams, and I have done my fair share of Engineering Software Process Management. Meh.

I like code. And so, for as long as I can, I'll keep writing software.

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