Tales From Dev Support

08 May 2024

One day while working on a ticket a customer mentioned they were seeing “Phantom Dynos” attached to their app causing issues. This was very unusual & none of us had seen anything like this before. It turned out to be a very rare edge case but we got things resolved and everyone moved on happy as Larry. However, during our trobleshooting & discussions one of my colleaguse mentioned how “Phantom Dyno” sounded like a pop punk song title…. That gave me ideas & that evening after work I decided to make a pop punk track called Phantom Dyno, and the Tales From Developer Support tracks were born.

The first edition did so well (in that it made everyone on the team giggle) I decided to do some another. That became “Things Customers Say.” A lovely little ditty about why it’s so important to keep and attitude of “trust but verify” while helping folks to troubleshoot.

Some time passed between Episodes I and II but inevitably it spawned Episode III, which in many ways was my most ambitious track so far. It’s “Sad Database Song”, a retelling of Hurt by Johnny Cash from the point of view of a Database Developer. This one was the first time I’d recorded acoustic guitars and wow, they’re a lot trickier to get recorded correctly than electric guitars!

Episode IV is another reworking, only this time it’s of the classic Slayer song Raining Blood. This one started out as a joke while doing our annual corporate messaging. It was only supposed to be a 30 second bit of fun in a single meeting, but it ended up morphing into the full track seen here.

All of the tracks haqve been completed a long time, but I finally got around to creating lyrics videos for them and getting the tracks hosted for folks to watch em.

Hope you get a giggle!