Chart the Deck Before You Sail
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Before we plot the course we mean to steer
We walk the hold and count what's stowed down here
Casks nobody logged, a line nobody can trace
The rot's not where you're looking, it's some forgotten place
Chart the deck before you sail
Know the hull before the gale
What you can't see, you can't save
We learned it hard, we learned it brave
A rope tied off to something no one's touched in years
Still takes the strain, still holds against our fears
Cut it blind and half the rigging falls
Map it first, and no one drowns when trouble calls
Chart the deck before you sail
Know the hull before the gale
What you can't see, you can't save
We learned it hard, we learned it brave
No new sail goes up till the old ropes are known
No new plank goes down till the rot's been shown
We don't draw the dream till we've drawn what's true
Then the crew believes it, and the crew sails through
Chart the deck before you sail
Know the hull before the gale
What you can't see, you can't save
We learned it hard, we learned it brave
Walk the hold, walk it slow
Mark what's fastened, mark what's froze
Only then do we set the wheel
Only then does the passage feel real
The band
The Long Haul
A work song. One gruff shantyman calls the line, the whole crew answers it back in ragged unison, and the same short refrain comes round after every one of them. Concertina, fiddle, boots on boards and nothing electric. Always we, never I - what it knows, it learned the hard way and a long way out.
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 Why You Should Document Your Current Architecture Before Designing the Future.
Every team wants to design the perfect future architecture, but skipping the current state almost always leads to hidden dependencies, underestimated complexity and costly surprises.