Ballad of Senior Dev

February song, it’s called “Ballad of Senior Dev”

It’s about being a good senior developer. This was recorded over the past couple of days during the criminal invasion of Ukraine. Today I attended a anti-war demonstration in Berlin where 100,000 people gathered in support of Ukraine.

The Russian Embassy

Russia invaded Ukraine

two days later

I invested a short amount of time over two evenings writing the lyrics, the following weekend I then recorded an initial version of the song (version 1), a very poor Nick-Cave style ballad, it was out of time and not very great. I resolved to record a metal version of it.

On Saturday, I spent 4 hours recording a first “metal” (version 2). Usually I find that as much as I hate the thing I’m recording, the more I work on it the more I can make it something I “like”. Listening to “version 2” now I’m pretty sure it was doomed. So I then started version 3, it took the remainder of Saturday and then Sunday morning before and after the anti-war demonstration.

Comparing it to Lamb of God mixes I tried to turn up the kick drum and make it “click”. For the vocals I tried mitigating the poor acoustics in the room by putting a sheet over my head. I think that did improve the quality, but not hugely, and it made reading the lyrics and performing repeated takes tiresome, so I abandoned that and accepted the reverb.

I actually googled “meatal song structure” after recording and failing with version 2, and decided on something simple with a verse, chorus and bridge.

The final version here seems very loud, louder and more distorted than the final in mix in Ardour.

For drums: I used the AVL drumkit plugin (the Black Pearl Kit) for version 2 (version 1 had no drums) but I switched back to DrumGizmo (used on my “testing” song) for the 3rd version. It seems to sound better.

No new musical equipment since the last recording. I actually used both the shitty MIDI keyboard and DAW controller extensively this time round. The usefulness of the MIDI controller was improved by getting the DAW latency down to about 4ms which probably helped with being able to play realtime “drums” (previously the latency was 12ms).

The following are the raw, nonsense, lyrics, not all of them used:

Deprecation Hysteria

50 packages engineered to perfection
Sepearated boundaries, dependecy injection
Domain separation, infrastructure isolation
Value object and entity deferentiation

DTOs at the edge providing integration
You know nothing about my implementation
My pure tests have no mutations
Everything works without hestiations

My pure tests have no mutations
Everything works without hestiations
I'm a senior dev, I need no consultations
I have no need for your observations

It's so meaningless, my work is pure
There are no side effects
There are no defects
It works exactly as it says on the box
I designed that box

I don't care about business requirements

You couldn't design it better than this
Stop questioning my work
It is as I made it
Your ideas are not better than mine

Stop questioning me
Yes, this class has 50 methods
And that's what it needs
I put them there because they are necessary
There was not another way

I break my rules to be practical 
I'm not a hypocrite, I'm a senior dev
So listen to me, I can teach you alot
Just do what I say and not as I do

Why won't you heed my rules?
I'm more senior than you
It says so in my job contract, look
I've made it you see, I'm a senior dev

I'm not toxic
I'm a senior dev
I earn more money than you
look: 200,000 euros per year

You cannot understand
It took more than 5 years
To get where I am today
So much pain and suffering

They can't teach this in university
I make progress by failing
I'm a senior dev
My path is known
By the smoking ruins of projects
That lie in my wake
Don't look behind
This time will be different
I know what I'm doing

It's so lonely out here
(he's a senior dev)
Nobody understands me
(he's a senior dev)
I'm beyond all of you
(he's a senior dev)
You're all stupid
(he's a senior dev)
So so stupid