I’ve been a Dave Matthews Band fan for going on 10 years now. I’ve watched the band grow up, and I’ve listened as the music has gotten better and better. I’ve been a fan since before the band was mainstream, and some of the best tunes they’ve ever done have been around for almost two decades.

Without a giving a full history of the band, which you could find on sites like www.nancies.org, www.antsmarching.org, or the official Dave Matthews Band Website, I can tell you that the band self-produced and published an album called “Remember Two Things”. On this album back in the early 1990’s was a track called “Tripping Billies”. Although the title doesn’t support it, the song falls in line with a long list of songs written by Dave Matthews in the “Carpe Diem” (Sieze the Day) theme. It’s incredibly upbeat, and it’s in my top 5 favorite DMB songs.

Because Kyle, and Jim were also DMB fans, when we were asked to pick a group name for our development team during our compiler design course in college, we picked “Tripping Billies”. On Friday of last week, I found myself sitting at the bar with my superior, Maria during lunch. We talked about a bunch of stuff, and college classes came up which made me reminisce for a moment about those awesome days back in college, so I though I’d post about it.

Compiler design - the class - had been traditionally taught by one of the coolest professors on the east side of the Mississippi. Dr. Whitfield stood about 5′3″ tall, but she could handle herself. She was the students’ preference for learning in the Computer Science department at SRU. She was uncharacterstically nice for a professor, although she was tough as nails. She was extremely fair, and her evaluations always reflected that if you put your work in, asked questions when you had them, and studied hard, you’d do well for her. I adore Dr. Whitfield as a friend, and I still talk with her all the time. Compiler design was her bread and butter. Compiler optimization was the centerpiece for her disseration when she was in school, so it was her expertise that made this class so rewarding.

Perhaps it was the “Hoy Factor” which led to my class being the first to learn that subject without Whitfield. The class itself is the capstone class for the computer science student, drawing on everything you’ve learned to date, and it’s by no means an easy class. In 15 weeks, we’re going to build, test, and deploy a compiler written for our very own computer language. In order to improve the project, we worked in teams of three, and one group had four. Selecting group members was optional, and knowing Jim and Kyle, and my own abilities, I thought we’d work well together. Enter the Tripping Billies.

I can’t remember how many sleepless nights we had, sitting in the computer lab well after the lab had closed. I had keys for all the campus buildings, so I’d let us back in after the labs closed. We would sit, scheme, develop and debug our application until exhaustion set in. It was grueling, especially doing everything in Tru64 Unix, running the ancient CDE (common desktop environment). The new development environments for languages like C++, C#, Java, etc… weren’t available to us. So we’re doing everything in VI and Pico - yea, it sucked.

There’s no surprise that if you look where Kyle, Jim, and I ended up, you’d find Jim working as a golf professional, and Kyle as a systems administrator, whereas I am the lone full-time developer. Kyle’s slowing finding his way back to the development world, and I can tell he missed it, even if he didn’t realize he missed it The same dynamic was sort of present in our group. Jim and Kyle pounded out code, while Jim kept us error-free (for the most part). Since C++ was the language of choice at our school, and the compiler required lower-level C code, Jim was our specialist. He spent his first two years of college at John Carroll U. in Cleveland, where he was taught in C, so he had the good experience.

Sometimes we’d tussle with each other, sometimes we’d argue (just a little though), but each time we’d work it out. A lot of times we’d end a session because of a problem we couldn’t figure out due to fatigue, but most of those times, I’d catch a late dinner, and come up with a solution. I used to dream in source code, and I’d wake myself up in the middle of the night with the answer to a tough question we had the night before. It was awesome.

We turned our project in at the end of the semester and received one of the top grades in the class. Although the project ended, the friendships we forged are some of the highlights of my life, and I just wanted to thank Jim and Kyle for befriending me. I hope I did enough for them during our group campaign, because I know they did for me. Those long and sleepless nights were some of the best nights I’ve ever spent in my life. We had three monitors: one was for coding, one was for real-time MLB scores, and one was watching the real-time DMB setlists, remember? Excellent stuff.

Well Tripping Billies, although I doubt we’ll ever churn out a project like our compiler again, I know we’ll be a team forever.

“Eat, drink, and be Merry. For tomorrow we die.”