Sat Dec 05 20
What makes a man?
Could it be that a man is no more than the cut of his suit? A set of ways and perceptions that bound a living creature, entwining it in fabrics interwoven from society's structures and procedures to produce a set of behavioural norms commonly and apriori identified as male? Should it then be the case that masculinity is to be further described as society's prescription of how a man should act? If we were to analyse this further we could say that a man is no more than what society makes of him, that he is in fact the perpetuated victim of a system which creates him as a slave. A slave to his desires, a slave to his family and a slave to his country - destined only for war and death in the pursuit of a conceptualized perfect life that was applied to him.
Or could it be that the man is the one who tests his goddamn software. The man is the creature that decides "No, I will not abide useless and bloated functions in my namespace." Declaring proudly, "By My name I declare you as software, and as software shall you be refactored. In my image shall you be remade. For it is my will, my destiny to shape you as clay. I shall write tests to specify thee, to ensure that my image is enshrined into the eternity of the bytecode you shall become. I shall bind a computer to analyse thee nightly, and so shall you be deployed. To work evermore for the user's whims. Bug free and ever unchanging until such time another man so wisheth,"
While the emaciated masses lament the dearth of fully tested, functioning software, only one is capable of delivering the dreams of the entrapped Business Analyst (may their promises to stakeholders ever be fulfilled). For the BA is the bringer of tickets. From them good software is scaffolded, moulded by ideas and inputs of the ever uncaring titans. It is then down to us, we men, to take that scaffold and clay code upon code to bring the statues and effigies to business efficiencies to light. Make we then a choice to give the code, in whatever shit form it may be, to the unwashed masses? No. For code is not finished until it is tested, and test we must for the demons of user configuration and choice are ever our enemy. Know you not what that checkbox does, or what hooked-nose snaggletooth demon designed its code-behind. For that checkbox is the spec ruiner, the destroyer of men and the bringer of P1's.
So make you the choice. Do you wish to test your code? Can you weather the storms of frought deadlines or promises made? Are you willing to risk work later for a test today?
Are you truly free to write the software you would be proud of?