Looking for a reason to start playing with Twilio’s PHP Helper Library, Shahzeb Khan built (650)82OCEAN while anxiously awaiting the release of his favorite artist’s latest album.

Boys Don’t Cry is the long suspected second studio release from that of one Frank Ocean. Why a project around Frank Ocean? Shahzeb says, “I mean, it’s become a meme right?”

Fans of the rap artist are all too familiar with the waiting game as the album has been a tease since mid 2013.

Are You There Frank, It’s Me Shahzeb?

Tired of watching Twitter and music blogs so closely for any news of a release, Shahzeb thought he would save time on this effort for himself and two or three friends.

The Junior at UC Davis is studying Computer Science and Engineering. Putting those skills to use with PHP and Twilio he built (650)82OCEAN as a Lumen application. The project’s namesake comes from the Twilio number (650) 826-2326 behind it.

The service pings iTunes, Spotify, and Twitter every minute or so for any Frank Ocean updates. Inexperienced in the minutia of the album’s history thus far, I jokingly asked, “What if the album drops on Tidal?” Shahzeb laughed, but admitted he had done his research stating that Apple Support has hinted at the release.

The most “complex” part of the application includes a Twilio Controller for Lumen running a background job to handle the sending of SMS. He’s open sourced the following code on Github.