My original title for this blog post was “The Stoke Is Real.” After writing that blog post, I realized that it was full of cheese and that I needed to cut it (the cheese, that is). Rudy even helped me write a joke I really like, which is “Earlier this week, I had a bright flash of inspiration, and I’m still suffering from the retinal burn.”
So, here I sit on a Friday afternoon in a caffeinated state of mind, dreaming up ways to cut the cheese out of this post and keep it fresh and interesting, unlike cheese. [at the time of writing this paragraph, it was actually Friday afternoon, and I had just finished a 16oz cold brew with half-and-half]
Last Sunday evening at youth, I had an absolutely brilliant idea. So brilliant, I even renamed our Stanza chat to reflect that I have amazing ideas. Glenn youth does that to a person, I guess. I wrote my idea on the chat; I could hardly believe my good fortune at my absolutely amazing brainwave! After typing it out in a mad fury of excitement, I went to bed and tossed and turned in my excitement to greet the morning sun and find my colleagues’ accolades adorning my notification screen.
On Monday morning, I awoke to discover that my fellow workers did not share my enthusiasm for my absolutely brilliant idea. I argued with Kirby for a while and then decided that maybe my absolutely brilliant idea wasn’t such a great idea after all. Oh well. It all was for the good of the product, I think, so I’m thankful for that.
“Kent,” I hear you ask, “what was this amazingly wonderful idea? And why was Kirby so injurious to your ego?” Well, I can tell you a bit of background about where this idea came from. So, one of our eventual plans for the app is to make it easy for people to share songs between each others’ phones, similar to Apple’s Airdrop—this was not the scintillatingly bright and brilliant idea that I had, I’m getting to that bit here soon. There is a slight hiccup with this Airdrop-style idea, however, and that is that Android and Apple phones’ bluetooth functionalities don’t seem to, ah, pair well with each other. I even hashed this out with a fine young gentleman from Princeton, and we discussed some possible solutions.
Later that evening, there was some projector singing taking place, and I found myself wishing, “man, we need to have a song-sharing group link thingamajig for things like this, where some people might not be able to see the copy on another’s phone or a projector.” This was the core of my absolutely amazing idea. Imagine that instead of having to find a PDF on Google Drive, and sharing it on WhatsApp or Telegram, requiring many taps and much frustration, you could just tap one button that said “Share with my singing buddies” and then the app would take care of the rest. No worries about cross-platform bluetooth problems, or anything like that. Everything taken care of, boom. It would Just Work. Sad to say, Kirby doesn’t want to build this feature right now, but maybe if you guys bug him enough, he’ll change his mind.
In other news, Taylor, as we’ve told you “for like the last five posts in a row now”1 has been working on legalese for authors. He is finally done with the legal mumbo-jumbo now, and is taking leave for the next few weeks to prepare for his imminent wedding. Our programmer has also been making slow and steady progress at bringing the iOS app and its associated API backend service to fruition. I’ve occasionally been writing some of the code myself too, but I don’t have a lot of time to spare. I set Rudy up with the ability to push source code to our GitHub repository too, and he has been getting in on the fun by doing various little tweaks and stuff like that.
Kirby and Rudy have also been conceptualizing new and amazing ways to bring a more powerful and useful search interface to you, our future users, so you can easily and effectively find the specific song you’re looking for.
That about wraps it up for our fortnightly drivel. Hopefully it kept you entertained for a few seconds. As always, you can reach out with comments or questions at the normal places like our Contact page or by reaching out to us through our handily posted info on the About Us page.
Footnotes
- Attributed to Taylor Dirks, 2023
Leave a Reply