More Than The Phone Can Hear
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Two new questions dropped on a Tuesday afternoon
The website got its pages and it whistled both in tune
Nobody told the phone, so you tap Continue, bang!
"Something went wrong!" Reopen it, same old clang
The server's logs are spotless, it's having a lovely day
While the new kid at the door just turns and walks away
The server can say more than the phone can hear! (Oi!)
It's shouting brand-new words into a half-deaf ear (Oi!)
So list every word it says and give each one a page
Let the build go red backstage, not a stranger on the stage!
Nobody's the clown, the phone was just across town
On a slower train, a later week, the memo never came round
Ship it first where feedback's fast, nobody's wrong to go
But "first" slid into "only" and the server didn't know
The deal was always there, it just lived inside our heads
And heads are leaky buckets, so we wrote a test instead!
The server can say more than the phone can hear! (Oi!)
It's shouting brand-new words into a half-deaf ear (Oi!)
So list every word it says and give each one a page
Let the build go red backstage, not a stranger on the stage!
Old phones roam for weeks, they'll hear a word that's new
If it's "what's your job?", a skip will see you through
If it's "do you agree?", then stop, and say it true
"This app needs updating", not "the fault's on you"
If you change the conversation, count who's listening in! (Oi!)
The server can say more than the phone can hear
Fail the build! (Fail the build!) Not the first hello!
The band
The Standup
Fast, cheerful and upstroked, with a whole room shouting the hook back. Comic and rhyme-heavy, but the joke always lands on a real point, and it mocks the ritual rather than the people.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post A Server Can Say More Than The Client Can Hear.
When a server drives a multi-step flow, every step it can return needs a matching screen in every client, and the cheapest way to keep that promise is a test that fails the build when a step has no home.
More by The Standup
- Moon at Breakfast 3:24
- Look Before You Lock It 4:48
- Drop-In Replacement 4:53
- Say It Changed 4:56