Note that is article is purely for satire and any advice I really hope does not get followed here, it may get you in hot water with management or worse. Also anyone can be a King (men, women or whatever you identify as) otherwise enjoy
So you finally decided to read this article and must have wondered what it would take to become the king of developers. Sit back take a sip of your favourite beverage and flatuate because this article will change you entirely.
Starting out
Let's assume you are a developer who is just angry they are not a king or even a measley duke. Assumption is key to becoming a king, if you don't assume than what good are you? So one scenario to use this in is if you have a feature that needs to be developed, don't wait for some horrid analyst or your manager to give you a spec or tell you what to do. Just guess what they want and create something that is amazing to you. If they don't like it then they don't appreciate good workmanship and let them know that you are a developer and know best and if they still don't like it be profane and let them know that they are stupid, they are lucky to still have a job after arguing with the king or KIT (King in training).
Designing the perfect solution
As a KIT you must disregard any solutions presented to you, they are utter garbage and are from traitors to the crown. If you have a lead architect or lead developer trying to give you their view, fob them off or if you are due to give them a kingly game of squash later on in the afternoon then nod attentively and feign interest, what do they know? They are SOPs (Spies Of Management) who as we know are trying to sabotage your reign.
For the design it should be something so great and secret that only you and maybe a friend can understand it, use either unintelligible notation or a secret language to layout what you need then go on a 2 week vacation. A king needs their rest and when you come back to work and if any of your minions complain about the lack of clarity, tell them they are rubbish and if they persist get them fired, a treasonous minion can be a threat to your good authority, they are lucky that they don't get drawn and quartered like in the days of Fortran.
Now for the code
This step is so important, this will determine if you are king or a KIT still. Use 1 -3 letter for variable names, why waste precious keystrokes for anything longer and use of one variable type, the rest are superfluous bin fodder for your minions to fight over. Do not fall pray to the lunacy of tidy and readable code, this is up some dictatorial crap made by some hippy ideology. Make sure its complex and make it that you can only read it and outsmart those other cretinous developers on your team when it comes down to it, do you want them getting the credit for your hard work, do you want them fixing alleged bugs in your code, No! You are the king!! They are minions and they can go back to their minionous duties.
Start using fancy anagrams to explain fancy (nonsensical) concepts to everyone, So when talking about a fast way of storing data in a relational table, you can start talking about the marvels of Short Hexidecimal Internet Table (SHIT) or if you if you are called up to solve a shortfall in the IT budget, start telling management about Funding Under Calculations (FUC) and how it can maximise revenue.
Make sure you use these anagrams in code otherwise your ghastly minions won't remember the proper terms and will start writing utter horrific unkingly code which undoubtedly will end in your own downfall.
If someone questions code, start with a quote from a wise coding guru and use their statements to back up your code, everyone loves a rock programmer god don't they. So if someone says doing an entire SQL select than using one record from it is inefficient, you can turn back to them and say "Uncle Bob believes doing a select before breakfast is good for the soul" They won't dare argue after hearing this and you can wear your crown with pride as you see them sulking away.
People will often ask to pair program with you and as a king you should be open to this how an earth will you establish your court without people knowing what a good king you are however there are things you should do to help them.
Do not use IDEs, these are evil and only communist peasants use these, use something that the old kings used like VI (not VIM, this is a bastardization of VI and therefore, this is a tool for peasants ). If the tools the old kings do not appeal to your reign then create your own. The steeper the learning curve the better as it shows that you have true power enforce your subjects to use the same technology as you otherwise they can plot your downfall.
Testers
If you are unfortunately saddled with allies of management (AIM) also known as testers, you might find getting your work out there difficult and they may throw unnecessary wrenches in your plans because they found a bug or the client did not ask for this. Bah!! A king never creates bugs nor does the client know what they want. These fools have been brainwashed by the evil management and will try and will aid them in your downfall.
Don't listen to these fools, brush off their concerns if you can, say it's meant to work that way, if they disturb your slumber during the work day you shout out them, tell them how dare they wake you for such trivial nonsense and the ones that IM or email you constantly, ignore them, never help a tester... ever or they will plot against you!
If you are finding your code is not getting through then start to bad mouth them to their boss. Tell this boss guy that this tester was drinking at their desk or sexually harassed you that's why they think they found a bug and if this boss guy does not believe you, tell them you are the king and to hell with what they think.
The build and release
First off a true king should know that the build should break because it is utter garbage created by some radical hippies. If the code works on your machine (The Royal tower/laptop) then any other PC that can't compile it is inefficient and is only fit for fodder in a peasant's hearth.
Sometimes the satanic forces of management might talk about this horrific thing called "CI (Continuous Integration)". This is just another annoying ploy to dethrone you, this just creates work for you and your minions. Rather than making code compile with some automated process and heaven forbid create a release for your clients. Wouldn't you rather do important things like sleep, create really good code and harass HR?
Show management who's boss by refusing to embrace this process, tell them they are incompetent bufoons who should be shot for suggesting such wicked things. Try and sabotage the process at every turn, like delete random code to stop it from compiling, turn off machines vital to the process or if it a cloud based solution then unplug the connection to the world wide world. This should frustrate management and with time they will realise they are stupid and will give up and bow down to the king.
A king should only build DLLs/executables on their machine for the client and not allow some automated process or minions compile their precious gems, these inferior beings are not worthy of this great honour. A king should copy the compiled code onto a medieum of their choosing, don't be afraid to embrace old and slightly eccentric technologies to aid you in delivering this paragon to the client. Some good examples are vintage floppy disks, obscure formats such as minidiscs or 8 track are also good contenders.
If a client does not have any devices that can access these mediums then a proper king tells the client that they should aquire said devices and if they resist then berate the client and tell them they are philistines and don't deserve your unique gems.
Debugging failing applications
A client may find a flaw in your otherwise perfect code or maybe something does not work on their inferior hardware and it is up to you to fix it. Makes sure that these complaints come to you as a king you should be able to address these feeble minded miscreant's oinking sounds and put them at ease or at least out of business. Start with the phrases "What problem?", "Have you tried turning it off and on?". Make sure you can be brash as possible with them because afterall what do they know, if for some reason they have a support team, refuse to communicate with them, tell them you are much more experienced then them and they should get a job at McDonalds or something.
If the complaint still persists then see if you can get access to their systems so you can see what the issue is, if what they complain about actually happens and it is not immediately obvious, copy the sourcecode on the machine and try running it. Using your kingly powers you can see which line the problem happens and fix it there and then. If their hardware is not completely crap, you may be able to compile and fix the alleged problem.
Are you ready to become a king?
If you have read this horrific guide from top to bottom and follow most of these practises then you are a true King and probably should start to think about in what ways you can improve as a developer.
A lot of these experiences I have seen in other developers during my career and some I have seen in myself and I thought it would be comical to produce this piece.
Top comments (1)
I loved the 'The Royal tower/laptop' :)