At the dairy aisle at the supermarket, I suddenly had a golden vision
Spectre of Sponge
There is a spectre haunting Sponge
In every vector it will lunge
Always shadowing sponges images
The recurring phantom of the Cheese
Is it made from yellow poriphera
Or sliced Swiss and creamy Velveeta
The mysterious cheese enables you
To have your Sponge and eat it too
Test Servers are an awesome occurrence. We should have one every week!
Fireballs and FLARD
Hiding by the FLARD factory
I saw the start of the melee
As gabizou procured a wand
Raining fire upon the land
Wands were cast into the crowd
It would have made Hephaestus proud
Fireballs flew from every hand
As sponge grew quietly across the land
Bridges, gates and elevators
Placed by the administrators
Gave many directions to run
From all the incandescent fun
Sponge still needs parts to be free
Permissions, persistence, all WIP
Though foundations are yet fresh cement
Know that Sponge needs more events!
Like a bull at the gates of Eternity, so the wishes of grains of sand whisper in the clouds. Or something.
Whoops 2: The Whoopsening
As SpongeDocs focus magnifies
The Whoopsening Intensifies
With Spongy loose on Git
Making square pegs fit
Providing previews galore to analyse
A new status we chose to inject
To protect an unfinished object
The tag “WIP”"
May rapidly be
Manifested all over the Project
[Title stolen from a PR by gratimax and/or Spongy]
This story of loss and redemption brought to you by the FLARD, may it outlast polyethylene
Launching Sponge
There’s many a slip between keyboard and chair
That wends into chaos and coding despair
Tangles result given enough time and rope
The new PEBKAC detector brings a new hope
It warns of the thing one should never try
To Compile and Launch the bare Sponge API
Welcome to Sponge Celebrity Death-match! The winner collects their body-weight in FLARD!
Spongie vs Travis
Travis is receiving much beration
Giving Dis-Continuous Integration
We shall paint your place in Alabaster
Teaching you that Spongie is your master
Apologies to Sting/The Police for filking 
Progress always comes with a beat. Sometimes it beats on you.
Musical Spongy Chairs
Channels are quiet all over
Sponge needs a soundtrack that rocks
Dance, every poriphera lover
'til whenever the music stops
And we all sit down to discover
They’ve rearranged all of the Docs
I can state with absolute certainty that I am probably doubtful of the veracity of this statement
An Ode to a Bad Packet
Client-side authentication
Also known as
An exercise in frustration
Never secure unless it can
Install your OS,
And probably not even then
The hurdle has always been
Hacking the protocol
for the system that you’re in
Closed-source and updating
The industry fix-all
Occasionally also creating
Guru meditation error. #000FFF Restarting Inscrutable
All-devouring Sponge continues its’ rampage across the realms. Will it stop for a nice cup of tea? News at 11.
Sponge the Epic: Part 31.167
Spongineers have landed
Upon a distant planet
Our spongy sphere expanded
The day that Sponge ate Granite
Dual implementations
Idiosyncratic creatures
Doubling complications
They’re not bugs, they’re Features
Fit as a Fiddle: like a cello having a seizure.
Sponge the Eldritch
Spongie fights madness:
Celebrity Deathmatch with
Nyarlathotep
This week’s guest developers for Sponge will be Bill and Ben, the FlowerPot men.
FlowerPot Class-War
We can achieve some tangible improvement however
Homogenising developer-facing interfaces in order
To provide a consistent and intuitive rhyme
For aspect-oriented development paradigm,
Reinforced by rigid adherence to parameters
Of vertical software development pentameter
The first of the fourth month connects all the dots
In every Sponge class, there shall be FlowerPots
Once a jolly swagman fell into an open sewer and died. On another topic,
Crowdsourced Homogeneity
Floating ideas in the cloud
Merciless critique by the crowd
See Sponge’s best laid plans
Get homogenised by the Fans
You can explain a deterministic minimal spanning tree traversal in prose? Challenge Accepted
Re-Inventing Inventory
Morpheus said to free your mind
Forget everything of the API mess
Abstracting hell out of things you find
Or exposing the underlying horribleness
A third path Mumfrey has expounded
Metadata query by arbitrary operands
Accessible, extensible, well rounded
Completely encompassing all the demands
This deterministic minimal spanning tree
May be traversed in code or song
One caveat to developers-would-be:
Most of this code is subtly wrong
Apologies to any moss aficionados for any slight to the fluffy green stuff
Critical Mass
Developers are all on-board
The project source is FOSS
Sponge keeps rolling forward
Keeping us free from moss
Ever onward the Sponge rolls
Complicating each new class
We have to count the Trolls
When calculating Critical Mass
Our major source of worry
Anticipation Overload
Release the pressure, hurry,
Before we all explode
Java’s great, I can’t live without a cup each morning.
Python? I could go my whole life never touching one. - AbrarSyed
The Element of Sponge
Building Sponge seems to be
Like synthesising element 123
A theoretical island of stability
In the midst of impossibility
In anticipation of the imminent escape release of Sponge dev builds
Sponge the Epic: Part 32.000
“Never code when sick and/or mad.”"
Is this even possible with Sponge?
Not that any developers are bad
But their madness we cannot expunge
Six months the heroes have laboured on git
Assembling their new API
Expending much toil, time and talent on it
Never once questioning why
Hooks for Data, Networking, and Text
The Scoreboards, Statistics and Bans
Inventory, Items, World Creation next
And the nifty addition of Commands
The Sponge beast will soon be awakened
From the crazy anthill of their labour
Test Sponge alpha from nether to end
Discover what side of sanity you favour.
A short plea floating up in a bottle from underneath the deluge of API commits …
We got some splainin to do
Absence of Docs will
Do a dev’s brain in
Many API bits still
Need some explaining
Here is a modest and completely incoherent/inconsistent suggestion for a Test Sponge Plugin. It is quintessentially experimental in (or on) nature.
Nothing to see Here
FLARDplugin does magnificent things
We cannot describe the joy it brings
Cryogenic explosive combustible liquid
Charring the shrubbery, summoning squid
Edible expanding and possibly contagious
Engineering possibilities of FLARD are outrageous
Disregard everything; this is only a test.
The real FLARDplugin does not (yet) exist.
If the shoe fits, wear it. If the shoe fits on your head, wear it as a hat.
Papers, Please
Sponge server will rock your socks off
As test plugins knock your blocks off
And API updates write the Docs off
At the stately State of Sponge the third
Witness mixins as the modus operandi
Every developer, dilettante and dandy
Please have your passport papers handy
To enter the State of Sponge and be heard
Having survived the apocalyptic State-of-Sponge III server, here is some helpful guidance
Breaking Sponge
Please come and break our Everything
It needs a robust test
Please squeeze it all, give it a wring
To make our Sponge the best
The sponge-encrusted crater that was once the Test server spawn is a testament to …
… something or other really really profound. K?
The Dragons of SoS III
Sponge multiworld’s glorious dawn
Immortal FLARD salesmen at spawn
Craftbook’s hooks weren’t in it
Broken at the last minute
At the flowerpot memorial we mourn
Zidane spoke of the new API parts
Mumfrey incanted flowcharts
All gave their report
Even those who forgot
As we waited for server restarts
Barriers encased a pet giant
FLARD factory non-safety compliant
Tripod coming ashore
Q&A took the floor
And TNT rain was descendant
To mix-and-match worlds we were summoned
Like puppets at an admins command
Each one with Dragons,
(Who can resist raggin’?)
Often leaving little left of the land
Giant Spongie ruled over the plain
Fallen anvils and evil bunnies remain
Messages in the sky
Made for a happy MsI
Whilst this sleep-deprived bard went insane