Whose stack is it anyway?
A technical guesing game
28 February 2024 > AoIR 2024 workshop submission / ...
Choosing the right tech is nothing short of a gamble. Whether we are building academic or industry products, the tools we rely on often remain shrouded in technical terms, outdated dependencies and obscure documentation — if you’re lucky.
The stack or rather, your stack, encompasses all the tooling, systems and infrastructure that enables you to do technical work, ranging from plotting data to packaging websites and from authoring collaborative documents to hosting fully distributed computing clusters. Ideally meticulously organised but more likely barely standing, these towering builds can be found at any scale: take out one piece and watch them topple over like a stack of bricks.
More concretely, stacks compromise the software, hardware, toolchains and modules that your project simply cannot function without (Leeftink & Angus, 2022). Or no project can function without: all our digital work depends on a long-winded road of engineering decisions stretching as far as the first operating systems and likely much further. When operational, ‘just’ a friendly interface to our files and data, but once something breaks, good luck sifting through year old forums, cryptic help messages and low-res instructional videos to find that flag you should have set on install, comfortably tucked under an obscure configuration.
But stacks do not just compromise our work when they break. The slew of assumptions baked into each component results in a terribly complex assemblage of distributed ownership and responsibility, influencing what you can and cannot technically do. What file types are accepted? Which languages are supported? How can interfaces be operated? Customised? Which legacy systems are depended on? Who made these decisions in the first place? When developer considerations are distributed this far and wide, you cannot help but wonder: whose stack is it anyway?
Game setup
This workshop is based on a collaborative game where we answer just that. Your participation will attune you to the popular but often obfuscated stacks used within industry and academia and the non-level playing fields on which they are built. Contestants are given pointers to map out a (research) stack of choice, and through role reversal are given the opportunity to guess which industry or academic players were involved in their creation. The rules are simple:
- Participants are divided into subgroups and assigned team A and B.
- Both are given a demo on how to use a .stackfile and inspect package.json requirements.
- Participants are asked to determine which dependencies are distinctive to a particular project’s tech stack.
- Teams have to present and guess which project (e.g. SciPy, Typst, Enso, Chat-GPT) the other team’s dependencies are part of.
- Points are won if the opposing team infers which dependencies belong to what project (in other words, points are gained when the other team makes a right guess).
There is room for 24 participants. For effective participation, please register a GitHub account and bring a connected device.
References
Leeftink & Angus (2022) > The Research Stack: A Framework for Data-driven Humanities and Social Science > The SAGE Handbook of Digital Society, 131.