Collaboration

There are many kinds of technical velocity debt 1. There are those decisions you, as an engineer, make in the moment to finish a piece of work. Given more time, energy, and space to think, those are decisions you would have made differently. There’s the kind of debt that’s unused code—a retired feature, ignored test specs, multiple implementations of the same helper method or component. Then, there’s the kind of debt that we’ll cover here, debt that isn’t even directly yours, but it impacts you every single day: outdated dependencies. ...

As the next step in the exploration of the ideas behind the Dada Photo Booth, Adam and I reworked the project for showing at the Museum of Human Achievement during the 2018 East Austin Studio Tour. Responding to a call for artists working with the concepts around taking selfies, we intended to directly transplant our piece into one of about 30 stations in a selfie gauntlet. Personally, I was looking forward to the challenge of architecting and coding a stand-alone, self-service iteration of the Dada Photo Booth. However, once we received the requirements and context around the selfie gauntlet, it became clear that this would be an exercise in doing more with less coding. ...