Reading time:

5 minutes

Word count:

999

(PARENTAL GUIDANCE: THE BLOG ENTRY IS FOR THE OVER 18)

Pick A Fight

If a competitor sucks, say no. When you do that, you’ill find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being anti-laggard, anti-improvement, and anti-accepting-the-status-father-of-a-quo is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.

The song Nobody’s Fault But Mine was an original traditional blues and gospel song from the early twentieth century, it is listed as a negro spiritual as part of the 1924 Cleveland index. In 1976, Led Zeppelin, the progressive rock band of that era of hard rock music, made a heavily modified  version of the song on their album, Presence.

From Youtube.com 74BlackDiamond74 Nobody’s Fault But Mine Live At Knebworth England 1979

What really love are the lyrics, where Robert Plant sings his admission to defeat to concede. These are inspired lyrics, and I am unsure if these lyrics are found the original negro spiritual or not. To be honest, I don’t care, because in music it is all about the delivery, passion and the performance.

Devil he told me to roll
Devil he told me to roll roll roll roll
How to roll the log tonight
Nobody’s fault but mine

These lyrics explains exactly how I feel about life, right here right now, my passion about learning, my acceptance of the Beyond Java on the JVM movement.

Here are the items that I am not apologetic about:-

• That moving beyond Java pisses you off. That you cannot see the value of Groovy, Clojure or Scala or Visage or another other alternative JVM language.
• That you have a political agenda that makes you want cling stead fast to backwards compatibility
• That maybe I appear to you to be behaving like the subject in The Beatles song, The Fool on the Hill; but in actual fact I believe that you should study the lyrics of the late great Michael Jackson: Man in the Mirror
• That you are incapable about wanting to learn more about functional programming
• That you think that I am eminently unemployable or unconsultable or uncontractable. I don’t give a fuck, go and find some maintenance programmers if that is your wish. I would rather be on the outside and definitely not involved on your inside.
• For telling it like it is, and for keeping it real like Sarah Lane does on The Social Hour (that is now a very cool podcast: It is great to hear some female perspectives on this fucking thing we call the information technology industry. Go! Ladies, go!)
• For being motivational and for pushing innovation, especially on the Java platform
• For being passionate about Scala, JavaFX or Groovy or any else that I am interested in

And here are the items that I am sorry for:-

• If I ever let you down with sometimes poor organisation skills. Did you know that multi-tasking is a myth? I read the book, bought the tee-shirt, watched the movie and I know this statement is true.
• If I ever turned up to work late, missed that meeting that you organised, never paid my respects to your authority. I will do so from now on and put credit in your emotional bank, because everyone needs emotion investment, isn’t this correct?
• If I never responded in time to solve your request, then it is my responsibility as well as my fault. From now on I will get a set work-item-limit imposed on myself. I will not take on tooi many tasks in fixed time period. In fact I have taken Agility, tasks, and a whiteboard into running my own personal life. It is instantly rewarding, because my memory is not good. Writing down tasks and putting stickies on my personal whiteboard has done wonders for my planning.
• If I ever failed to live to up your expectations, then you can be sure that I have even higher expectations of myself. I kicked myself even harder and your feedback helped to improve my outlook and shift my gears.
• If work-life balance got in the way of my passion to serve you then it is because I know that good health and fitness does wonders for performance and the soul. Please, if you not done so, read the book, Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson and their frank warnings about workaholicism. I guarantee that you will agree with mine and their sentiments.
• If we in social or working life never got on with each other. Life is like that unfortunately, may be it is just as well. Sometimes working relationships do not work out great, you win some and lose some, we can only to do the best we can in the time we have. Personalities clash I can live it and so can you. Best luck with whatever you do next. Let us just shake hands and move on.
• If my push for new ideas left you scared shitless about you change then one need not be afriad. After all we are all here for learning. I will take it to you, my teachings of wisdom, at your learning pace from now on, but only if you have an open mind like a parachute, receptive to new ideas. If you don’t have one, then fuck off, because I don’t ever want to be on the laggard (old fart bastard) end of the technological adoption curve. I am fucking serious about this item. So fuck off with your ignorant self, if your heart is truly set on hatred

This is who am I. I am clear. I am transparent. I am Peter Pilgrim. I am rolling with the devil, because we have to move on to groove on. Understand.

Finally another little quote, from Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanson

Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

There you have it.