Snapchat Lens Competition

A million of anything

The figure on the cutting is the only one that matters and it is the one I still find hard to hold in my head. A lens is a small thing. You build it, you publish it, and then a number goes up somewhere without you, and at some point that number passed a million.

Nothing about making it felt like that. It was a competition entry, built to a brief, in a tool I had to learn on the way. The distance between how small the work felt and how large the number got is the first time I understood that software is not paid for by effort. It is paid for by how many people happen to be standing where you put it.

What the prize was for

The £1500 was not mine. It was awarded to the school for technology resources, which is the detail I would keep if I could only keep one, because it changes what the entry was. I was not competing for a payout. I was competing for the equipment the next set of people through that department would get to use.

That is a good shape for a first piece of work and I have not really stopped preferring it. The projects on this site that I am proudest of are the ones where the thing built outlasts my involvement in it: the tools left behind in London, the studio sites still running for clients who no longer need me, a repository somebody else can read.

Software is not paid for by effort. It is paid for by how many people happen to be standing where you put it.

What I would do differently

I kept no telemetry, no source I can point at now, and no write-up. A million uses and I cannot show you a single frame of it. Everything since has a repository and a README, and that is not a coincidence: this is the piece of work that taught me the difference between having done something and being able to prove it.