To avoid violating the morals of my community, by which I shall not enter into ridiculous arguments about whether a square is a simplified polygon or specialized triangle, and I shall never look forward to meetings where nothing is produced except whiteboard output and a roomful of carbon dioxide. I swear that my desire to enter the computing profession is not to become an architect and, should I realize that I am not as smart as I thought I was and am unable keep up with fellow programmers in the real world, I shall not be bitter about this and become an architect just so I can make their lives miserable with stupid over-simplifications and banal proclamations about things I don't understand.

To not write code on the user interface thread that has any possibility of taking more than a second. To do so would mean that my applications freeze up on my users so when they grab the title bar and move it around, it leaves a trail of cheese squares on the screen, giving them no choice but to nix my programs from the task bar and leave stuff in an unpredictable state. This I do promise to honor and obey.

To remember that a progress bar is designed to show the percentage completion of a long-running background task. When it is halfway filled, the task is half complete, and when it gets to the end, the task is finished. I shall not write a progress bar that doesn't at least attempt to move in a proportional fashion to elapsed time and time to completion, and I shall never, ever, make my user sit through a progress bar that, when it finishes and they think I'm done, starts all -over again. Verily and verily as such, I declare that install programs have no let out clause here.

Never to do deliberate harm to anyone for someone else's interest. This means remembering that e-mail is one of many media by which communication can occur and that whenever possible I shall not only try to talk to people but to spend as much time as possible listening to them. I shall never send snotty e-mails to colleagues to try to make me look great, to make them look worthless, or to do both by puffing up my own image by being a cad to fellow programmers. Likewise I will never be a pompous git in meetings just so I can try to make others look stupid and myself great.

To keep the good of the user as the highest priority of all I do. There may be other conflicts such as marketing weenies who have just read the latest FooBarnet report and insist I start using yoo-mel 7.5, or architects who have read the same report, but because they don't understand it are e-mailing me from the annual "Yogurt World" conference with urgent updates to the company strategy. I am the person who builds the code that the user gets, and I serve them and not other false deities who are trying to bluff their way to nirvana on the back of any success the product might achieve.

To recognize that I have no experience in the real world and, as I grow from grad to geek to giant, I will always humble myself and be prepared to learn and adapt so that I never violate any of the aforementioned oaths.