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Hacking to Great Guitar Rock Songs

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Preconditions:


  • Many hours of monotonous coding ahead. Perhaps data cleaning, comment-checking, pixel-pushing, or code reviewing

  • Desire to be entertained with lightly mind-engaging, upbeat music

Acceptance Criteria


  • Songs must be rock-and-roll, ie, from the last 60 years

  • Songs must feature prominent guitar work

  • Songs must have been popular when released

  • Songs must be recognizable to at least 40% of a randomly-selected audience

  • Songs must generally be upbeat

  • This must be a predefined, finite, readable list of songs that I own, not songs I want to buy, or songs I should be downloading

What would be the right way to code this? Given not a lot of time, I simply chose songs from "100 Greatest Guitar Solos" off of my hard drive. But I wondered: is there a better way? Not some quasi-internet radio station, a better way of picking songs with such fuzzy, yet describable criteria.

Result Set


  • Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin

  • Free Bird, Lynyrd Skynyrd

  • Hotel California, The Eagles

  • Crazy Train, Ozzy

  • Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry

  • Sharp Dressed Man, ZZ Top

  • Europa, Santana

  • You Shook Me All Night Long, AC/DC

  • Honkey Tonk Women, The Rolling Stones

  • Whipping Post, The Allman Brothers

  • Yellow Ledbetter, Pearl Jam

  • Walk, Pantera

  • Master of Puppets, Metalica

  • Crossroads, Cream

  • Eruption, Van Halen

Errors? Omissions? What was wrong with the code and what is the correct result set? What upbeat rock guitar songs are the best to hack to?

If you've read this far, you should follow me on twitter here.



2 Comments

"Dogs" - Pink Floyd
"Powderfinger" - Neil Young
"Go Your Own Way" - Fleetwood Mac
Something by Queen & Dire Straits. And you left out Hendrix & Dick Dale!

Good ones!

Thanks for the extra tunes.

I was sorely pressed to cut Dire Straits, Queen, and Hendrix. But you're right: I should have left them in.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on May 29, 2009 1:20 PM.

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Daniel Markham

Daniel Markham

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