By Travis Henry
Plenty of publications have posted blogs and essays explaining why musicians make better software engineers.
So it begs the question, does software engineering make for good music? Does a song about JavaScript pull at the heartstrings of the masses like it pulls on ours?
We dove in to find the answers and the results were, well, rather mixed.
Many of the entries we stumbled upon in our search harken back to the Gen X version of software engineers who were stuck in cubicles all day. It’s nice to see we have progressed a bit since then.
We acknowledge we’ve probably missed a lot (here’s one) and are eager to hear from you what other songs should have been on these playlists. With that said…away we go!
Songs about coding playlist
1. JavaScript Rock, John Fawcett
This is an oldie, but a goodie. In this video that looks like it was shot in a dorm room, a young coding enthusiast puts music to lyrics written by Syndey-based web developer Dmitry Baranovskiy as part of a Twitter challenge issued by Pamela Fox. While probably the least produced on this list, we love Fawcett’s enthusiasm and musicality.
2. Coder Girl, Dale Chase
Unfortunately, we failed to find any decent songs about coding made solely by women (although Pamela Fox is mainly responsible for our number one song on this list.) We found great videos chronicling the lives of women software engineers, but no songs. We would love to think we are wrong, so let us know in the comments what we missed. In the meantime, here’s an “ode to female programmers” by coder/rapper Dale Chase.
3. Code Anthem, Nirajan Timalsina
Nirajan Timalsina is a senior software engineer and aspiring rapper from Nepal. While he is proficient in Java, C, C++, Python, UNIX and React.js, he’s also pretty handy with the mic.
4. JavaScript source code over Wu-Tang Clan beat, Subliminal Spectrum
Coder Andrew Carpenter, aka Subliminal Spectrum, pulls off a pretty cool trick rapping JavaScript over the Wu-Tang Clan beat from Tearz. The cool thing is the application downloads a zip file of other music by Subliminal Spectrum.
5. The JavaScript Rap, MC meSpeak
Going all the way back to 2013, we are giving our top spot to The JavaScript Rap which was compiled from the same crowdsourcing that gave us our No. 5 song on this list. Why does this song land at No. 1? It’s a song about JavaScript performed by JavaScript. Yep. The song is delivered courtesy of meSpeak.js. “a 100% client-side JavaScript text-to-speech library based on the speak.js project, a port of the eSpeak speech synthesizer from C++ to JavaScript using Emscripten.” Check out JavaScript rapping The JavaScript Rap, client-side, yo.
