Contemplating Game of Thrones finale and arguing about the ending is all we can do at this point (and our daily jobs, of course). Luckily, we came across some fun facts known only by few. Some would gladly rewrite the end, but before they get on with that, this article will help them understand.
Each programming language is connected to our favourite fictional characters and will impact their lives in Westeros! If you’re a true fan, you’ll recognise the truth behind each line in this article. May your lines of code be clean and may the Light of the Seven be with you.
House Lannister – Java
Home: Casterly Rock and sophisticated Web apps
Sigil: A golden Lion on a field colored by AWT
Main interest: Client-server web apps and ruling the world.
Most proud of: JDK, NetBeans and Eclipse IDE, anchoring Android apps, Tyrion’s logic until Season 5.
Least proud of: Being related to Joffrey.
Strongest features: Truly Object-oriented, flexible, secure, and multi-threaded, great sword-fighters and war strategists.
Negative aspects: memory consuming and slower than some C languages, backstabbing Kings and sneaking out in the middle of the night to abandon Brienne.
Special ability: Being semantically opposite of winter by using a single modular framework (if you’re a grammar nazi, we’re talking about Spring here – NOT about Bran’s late Direwolf Summer. We all know how Lannisters feel about Bran Stark, and the things we do for love).
Hobbies: JUnit, tournaments, and raising Zombie Knights. Might occasionally enjoy some Ale or Mockito, but you’re always Groovy.
Hear us roar! And stop confusing us for JavaScript, unless you’d like to learn what Rains of Castamere are about.
House Stark – Js
Home: Winterfell (The North does not forget – and neither does JQuery)
Sigil: Grey direwolf on body. style. backgroundColor = “white”
Main interests: dropdown menus, sliders, structure, design and meddling in Jon Snow’s love affairs.
Most proud of: Their origin, sigil and ancestors, features and interactive tools, and user driven outcomes.
Least proud of: Sansa’s poor taste in men, crashing into other areas (as in programming, we’ll leave out the destiny that follows Stark man once they head South. Head, get it?).
Strongest Features: Plenty of land, awesome choice of pets, and secure environment (except for the Lannisters, Boltons, Greyjoys and Freys, Wildlings and White Walkers. But it’s pretty safe if you’re only programming, and not marching to slap Lord Tywin or to sneak up on Night King).
Negative aspects: cold weather, code inflation, lousy new versions, having a relative who claims he’s a three-eyed raven.
Special ability: fast response and pun-friendly named frameworks (at least from our point of Vue, don’t over-React).
Hobbies: sticking enemies with the pointy end and enhancing user experience.
Winter is coming! But Angular’s still debatable.
House Baratheon – PHP
Home: Web Applications and PHPStorm’s End.
Sigil: A crowned black stag rampant (Once you’ve dealt with wild boars and Lannisters, everything is a piece of CakePHP)
Main Interests: Facebook, blood magic, sometimes Magento
Most proud of: Security and rapid development, cool new features, Renly’s good looks and strong PHP community.
Least proud of: slow execution, King Stannises final battle and trusting Melisandre (for the Night is dark and full of Yii), framework’s external dependency.
Strongest features: Open Source, continuous evolvement, Gendry Baratheon of the Flea bottom, and compatibility with several DB.
Negative aspects: Accused of inconsistencies, legacy baggage (can Robert’s rebellion be associated to this?), unfortunate event with princess Shireen and being slower than Node.js.
Special abilities: running fast like CodeIgniter, casting spells like: add a dash of Js (most likely Vue.js) and a drop of REST API. Watch out for wildfire by the Blackwater! In case your magic takes a turn for simple cloud API, don’t hesitate to reach out to Zend.
Hobbies: hosting and attending meetups, wild boar and throne usurpers hunting, facilitating error handling and implementing Abstract Syntax Tree, teaching sir Davos to read.
Ours is the fury! And Laravel, of course.
House Targaryen – Python
Home: Django ORM
Sigil: A red three-headed dragon on red SQLObject
Main interests: Iron Throne, long and complicated titles, general purpose programming.
Most proud of: Being able to develop web and desktop apps with equal ease and efficiency, freeing Meereen (and mastering Pyramid), wide usage, requiring fewer steps than Java or C++, making the Night King smile.
Least proud of: Not hearing the bells properly, not being suitable for mobile development, encountering Sam Tarly after going fully Drakarys on his family. Strongest features: Being protected by dragons & multi-paradigm approach, CherryPy-powered web apps.
Negative aspects: slower than some C languages, accidentally burning everything except the Red Keep – or as some might say, recklessly dropping the Flask.
Special abilities: Stormborn Developers, breakers of Blockchain, code readability, making the entry level programmers actually understand what they should do, yelling at people in High Valyrian.
Hobbies: Tornado (as in Web framework, even though you’d think of something way more cataclysmic), leading the Dothraki across the Narrow C, occasional automation testing, flying over 7 Kingdoms and making the Lords of Westeros run for cover.
Fire and blood! And TurboGears.
White Walkers – DevOps
Home: Containers
Sigil: we all kind of saw it a couple of times since episode one, but no one could quite get it. Let’s leave conspiration and unsupported theories and make it eyes as blue as Azure.
Main interests: Bringing the dead back to life, bringing development and operations teams together, making Tormund worry about the Big Woman, deployment and network operations.
Most proud of: Kubernetes, acceleration of application delivery, making the Hound angry – several times, the best musical theme ever written follows their leader into the battle, obtaining a fast recovery rate (in companies which integrated DevOps in their structure – and in battles)
Least proud of: losing a war to a little girl, being accused of causing security issues, vulnerabilities (dragonglass and Valyrian steel, as well as those that appear in Cloud during the automation process).
Strongest features: Pipelines, WhiteSource (commonly known as Wights, a large group of White Walker wannabes, sourced by the Night King himself).
Negative aspects: Feeling a little DevOps today, might build something with Maven, might kill Rhaegal and turn him against his family.
Special abilities: Causing dramatic music to play (and Ramin Djawadi to use piano again), integrating with basically any tool in continuous integration with the help of Jenkins.
Hobbies: Uniting the Northerners with the Free Folks, Mother of Dragons & co, making all eyes turn blue, using Docker to containerize apps, getting to make Podrick sing, scripting languages.
The Night KIng is coming. Watch out, we are the Docker Daemons.
Wildlings – WordPress
Home: CMS beyond The Wall
Sigil: Free folks have no sigil. But if they had to pick one, it would most definitely be a picture of a ten years old Tormund killing OptinMonster and befriending his wife.
Main interests: running freely through Simple Fields, drinking giant’s milk, breaching walls by dragging & dropping to honor the Beaver Builder, talking trash about the Night’s Watch while enjoying strong beverages.
Most proud of: Yoast, strong male and female characters, warriors with great sense of humor – and kissed by fire, updating content with ease.
Least proud of: Uniting with Thenns, security issues (being targeted by both hackers and the undead blue-eyed creatures), the lack of strategic planning – Mance Rayder and all those third party plugins, and their numerous creators.
Strongest features: being open-sourced, community, SEO plugins, fearlessness, adopting Ghost after Jon Snow marches towards King’s Landing (Dire wolf, not a blogging platform), popularity.
Negative aspects: default designs that should represent an advantage, but can quickly turn into a disadvantage, speed can also be an issue (from the perspective of a user, it’s a whole other story on a battlefield).
Special abilities: having a variety of tools, plugins, and features, overcoming differences and defending Winterfell, plenty of room for expansion (beyond the wall and in WordPress).
Hobbies: Telling jokes about the Crows, providing customizable templates, generating themes, attacking villages every now and then, telling Jon Snow he knows nothing.
House Tyrell – UX and UI designers
Home: Highgarden Prototype
Sigil: A golden rose that follows UI guidelines
Main interests: Creating wire-frames, research, understanding audiences, looking after users the way Lady Olenna looks after Margaery.
Most proud of: Analytical skills, strategic mindset, dodging a marriage with Joffrey, empathizing with users.
Least proud of: Plotting with Littlefinger (even though the cause was right)
Strongest features: Visual design skills, curiosity, the ability to make Cersei freakout, obeying principals.
Negative aspects: The ability to make Cersei freakout and not knowing she has a storage of wildfire, the necessity to have frequent reality checks – not all clients are up-to-date with your area of expertise and you’re the one who needs to adjust.
Special abilities: Combining esthetics and functionalities, managing to fulfil requirements and still create stuff in their own way, managing to convince High Sparrow into letting them avoid the walk of Shame, maintaining a Poker face during the Purple wedding
Hobbies: Visiting Flea Bottom and making Joffrey look even worse next to their kind behavior, reading about UX standards and practices, interacting with users
Growing strong, but not too strong, at least until the results of a detailed market research demand it.
House Martell – Ruby
Home: Sunspear, Dorne on Rails
Sigil: A Ruby colored Sun pierced by a gold spear
Main interests: Planning a revenge and hating Lannisters, creating Web applications, simplifying common repetitive tasks, turning into a Micro Web Hobbit and appearing in a happier story with Gandalf.
Most proud of: Feisty ladies who know how to act around a battlefield, the quote that states that Ruby was designed for programmer happiness, cool community (especially while Oberyn was present), helpful tooling and quality code libraries.
Least proud of: Poisoning Myrcella and starting a riot afterwards, those accusations that say RoR is a bit slow, performance issues caused by multi-threading.
Strongest features: Eloquence, not being afraid to challenge The Mountain (Gregor Clegane), being easy to learn (Rails make it more comprehensive for novices), cost-effective web development and website maintenance, responsive colleagues.
Negative aspects: Unfortunate participation in a trial by combat, shortage of flexibility (RoR might lack the room to get creative, but Ellaria Sand makes up for that), making a mistake costs way too much (just remember Season 4, episode 8, didn’t end too well for The Viper).
Hobbies: Listening to Sinatra, visiting Cuba, eating Grapes, overthrowing kings who are considered incompetent.
Unbowed, unbent, unbroken. And Nancy.
Dothraki – QA
Home: The desert in Essos and Jira
Sigil: Whatever will break programmer’s heart.
Main interests: bug tracking, writing test cases, winning in open fields, cutting off developers’ ponytails, epic horse riding, fighting errors and bugs with Smoke, questioning Sanity.
Most proud of: conquering Selenium Testing and territories across the Narrow Sea
Least proud of: their role in the Battle of Winterfell, their Khal becoming a trophy husband, the amount of time that takes for a Manual Tester to perform Regression testing.
Strongest features: extremely entertaining weddings, cool weapons (such as curved swords, daggers, White Box, Black Box, and whips), API Testing platforms
Negative aspects: If you choose to dedicate yourself to pointing out errors, you’d be the least popular person in Westeros and on a Daily Standup.
Special abilities: Denerys has Dragons, Cersei was trying really hard to expend her forces by bringing elephants. QA Engineers have Monkey. The ability to throw a piece of a rock on your keyboard and blissfully enjoy some Ale while bugs are being found spontaneously – now, that calls for immediate endorsement!
Hobbies: Planting Cucumbers and Eggplants all over Khalasar, saddling horses, braiding hair, going to wars regularly, reviewing quality specifications, test planning.
Addrivat all them bugs, you mighty Lajak Haj!
Greyjoys – C# and C++
Home: The Iron Oriented Islands
Sigil: a mighty ORM Entity called The Kraken
Main interests: Having a powerful Iron fleet and conquering every C, building desktop and Web applications, game development, BE programming
Most proud of: There’s a good man among them, being extremely fast, C# integration with Windows, wide support for C++ (and Yara Greyjoy), keeping Sansa Stark safe, Unity.
Least proud of: Eurons bad manners, invading Winterfell behind Robb’s back, archaic object orientation for C++
Negative aspects: .NET applications depend on Windows platform (and some older frameworks are not supported by Microsoft), the lack of safety while using C++ or deciding to protect Bran Stark from the Night King, little memory management (in C++ and after the encounter with Ramsay Bolton’s tortute methods)
Special abilities: Running towards the most dangerous villain on TV with a stick, multi-platformed, considerably speeding up development time, making the audience have all sorts of feelings for Theon.
Hobbies: Meta-programming, proclaiming leaders by almost drowning them (which isn’t a bad idea at all, considering Lord Balon and Euron), supporting multi-player option with networking.
What is dead may never die, unless it gets eaten by a C-shark.
House Tully – Mobile Developers
Home: Riverrun and over 2 million apps
Sigil: A silver Trout leaping on Android and iOS background
Main interests: Loving and hating Xamarin simultaneously, Feed(ing)Henry, Cocoa Touch and Kotlin, creating applications that will make an average person stare at their phones approximately 2h and 15 minutes each day, avoiding to attend any weddings since Season 3.
Most proud of: The Black Fish, React Native, Google Play Store, building a Lannister-proof castle
Least proud of: Marrying into Frey family, battery draining apps
Strongest features: Having a general-purpose, multi-paradigm compile programming language that’s at least 8 times faster than Python, having a ditch surrounding your castle in such manner that Frays can’t even get near, not with the help of the Boltons either.
Negative aspects: The possibility to have all their efforts annulled due to bad designing decisions, breathing life into cringey texts (and pics) by developing certain apps, costly iOS apps with no widget support, Lord Edmure agreeing to marry Roslin.
Special abilities: Creativity, Mobile User Interface, business logic and compatibility, SDK
Hobbies: Making people look for a charger, leaving Objective-C behind (Black Fish was to Lord Edmure what Swift is to Objective-C)
Family, duty, honor. Wi-Fi pass.
