If— (for Programmers)

If you can keep your HEAD when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or, being locked away, don’t deal in locks,
Or, being raced, don’t give way to racing,
    And yet don’t loop too good, nor thread too wise:

If you can branch—and not make branches your master;
    If you can commit—and not make commits your aim;
If you can meet with pass and fail
    And treat those two test cases just the same;
If you can bear to watch the code you’ve written
    Twisted by knaves on Stack Overflow,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
    And stoop and build ‘em up with debugging tools:

If you can make one heap of all your memory
    And leak it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And crash, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is NULL in you
    Except the Coffee which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can write PHP and keep your virtue,
    Or talk in Lisp—nor lose the common touch,
If neither monads nor functors can hurt you,
    If all bugs count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving second
    With a thousand milliseconds’ worth of instructions run,
Yours is the Machine and everything that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Programmer, my son!