“Twas the Night Before Release Date (2020 Version)”
‘Twas the night before release date and all through the net,
not one API responded—not even a GET.
The programmers all stared at their code in despair,
with hopes that a miracle soon would be there.
Product owners were nestled all snug in their beds,
while visions of funding rounds danced in their heads.
When into the Slack there arose such a clatter,
I jumped on the channel to see what was the matter.
And what did my caffeinated eyes finally see?
but a full-stack developer and a cloud IDE.
More rapid than eagles, her patches they came,
and she whistled and shouted and called them by name.
On Menu, On Report, Containers Delete,
On Docker, On Batch-jobs, On Functions Complete.
Her eyes were quite focused, fingers nimble and lean.
Her unit tests passed. PRs applied clean.
A bit of AI and her blockchain design,
soon made it clear that we all would be fine.
She spoke not a word, just heads down on her work,
turning specs into code; then she turned with a jerk;
And laying one finger upon the Enter key,
the pipeline deployed and worked perfectly.
The menues, they menued, the deletes they deleted,
containers deployed and the batch-jobs completed.
She tested each whistle, and polished each bell,
with ’nary a stack dump, and all had gone well.
The software was finished, the tests were concluded.
With even security fixes included.
The business gave feedback in all-caps, bold font:
IT’S JUST WHAT WE ASKED FOR, BUT NOT WHAT WE WANT!
Background
While I was looking for something else entirely, I discovered this poem sent to me back on 1 December 1997. I improved it to post it here. Which is to say, I didn’t think it was good enough, and the terminology in it was somewhat dated. So I modernised it using modern jargon.
In an effort to give credit to the original, I did a bit of research. It appears that I have joined in a long line of people, over the last 30 years or more, who have improved this poem to their own liking. In fact, it’s hard to find any two versions online that are precisely the same. Searching DuckDuckGo for ‘snarl and a taunt’ returns countless variations.
All the references I can find say “author unknown”. Here’s a small sampling.
- David E Weekly has a version on his web site dated December 11, 1996.
- Humor Etc Suggests a quite old version because it references
abend, which is “abnormal end” and an archaic term from the time before PCs. - Twas the Night Before Crisis suggests it is a version from 1985.
- A version from 2007 where the modifier had the same idea I had: change the gender pronoun to reduce the brogrammer feel. I also removed the six pack of beer.
I hope you enjoyed the 2020 version of it.