Never let it be said that software developers don't have a sense of humor, or rhythm.
Designed by Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and launched in 2005, Git, the source code management system, has won legions of loyal users. It's central to many if not most open-source software communities, and it's the basis of a wildly popular source-code hosting service called GitHub.
And now, Git has been immortalized in its own rap song. Posted to SoundCloud by New York coder Marak Squires, "The Git Rap" has been sweeping the software social media scene as fast as an over-clocked Pentium. A typical stanza:
so git hubbers just keep iterating
git tag all them versions keep the changelog stating
a brief description of things dun change
always using semantic versioning raaaaanges
its not dangerous
internet strangers
open-source bangers
coding in hangers
pull request slangers
that you dont wanna anger
break the bank at the Tangiers
flow like Danny Ocean
drink git kool-aide its a powerful potion
( chug chug chug )
All to a more or less pounding beat, as also created by Squires, who in his day job is one of three co-founders and "chief evangelist" at Nodejitsu Inc. That company is a PaaS provider specializing in the development and deployment of real-time apps. As its name implies, the company is big on Node.js, a high-performance and explosively popular framework that harnesses JavaScript for server-side programming.
That Squires lives and breathes Node.js is evidenced by an earlier rap song he posted to Soundcloud called -- you guessed it -- "The Node.js Rap." Celebrating the joys of programming in Node.js and JavaScript, the song is full of shoutouts to those who've contributed to the latter's function and longevity.
Squires tells me he has been making music for some time -- one of his earliest raps, from 1999, is about the Everquest fantasy game and can be heard on YouTube, he tells me. His coding-related raps are "just for fun," not made with any marketing strategy in mind. His SoundCloud page offers a small trove of songs, including a lively, New Wave-ish track called "The Stack Trace Boyz - Sexy Script."
Squires is hardly alone. So-called Nerdcore rap, and its computing-centric subgenre, "geeksta" (yo, check out MC Plus+), has a long and colorful, if not highly lucrative, history. And none other than Weird Al Yankovic has rapped about JavaScript, in "White & Nerdy," his totally brilliant parody of "Ridin'," by Chamillionare and Krayzie Bone. It remains every bit as entertaining as it was back in 2006, having racked up more than 70 million YouTube hits. Software giant Oracle last year produced what looks to be a high-budget rap video called "Java Life." Its straightlaced all-white cast dances amongst office cubicles and in the aisle of a datacenter, all the while dropping lines like, "Even Dan Brown can't code as hard as me."
Finally, "startup guy, hip hop artist, developer" Cory Smith, rapping as Smixx, posted to Soundcloud last year a tune called "Developers." Its highlight is sampled audio of a sweaty Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pumping up an audience by chanting "developers, developers" over and over. (You can hear Ballmer's sweat? No, but you sure can see it, right here.) A taste of Smith's lyrics:
I'm a developer
in many senses of the word
cause I make these applications
but I also use these verbs
to make this music
I construct it line by line
just like when I'm coding
another software design
in both cases
its about design patterns
anyone can get the job done
its the execution that matters
[...]
not a fan of jewelry
except for Ruby on Rails
I can use my skills
to increase my online sales
capitalize on the popularity of Facebook
or grill up some beats
so they declare me a great cook
never really been a big fan of insects
so I track down bugs
remove them when in test
make sure they never get pushed to production
but sometimes deadlines decide they get rushed in
I'm the same way
when it comes to my songs
perfection is the goal whenever the mic is on
Hardly the Beastie Boys -- may Adam "MCA" Yauch rest in peace -- but a coder's delight, nonetheless.
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