FAQ: What’s a @KevlinHenney?
In the name of failure
Recent events have prompted me to finally write up an answer to what is perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions I receive online and face to face. The question is normally of the form “What’s a @KevlinHenney?”, “What’s a @KevlinHenney screen?” or “Why do people send you failure screen pictures?”
The TL;DR can be found on Urban Dictionary:
Or The Register:
So, yeah, in short, my name’s associated with failure.
You can find me describing the backstory in this talk from Voxxed Days CERN 2019.
Just as software forms a part of our daily experience, so does software failure, whether within the privacy of our own phones or out in the open in more public spaces. Many years ago I started taking screenshots and photos of all this unintentional guerrilla installation art. And then I started using some of the images in talks or bringing them up during training courses or conversations… which led to people emailing their own images to me. And then came social media and network effects.
From screenshots to mobile phones
Software failures have always held a fascination for me — perhaps most noticeably when an application crashes while I’m using it. From around 2000 I started screenshotting these moments of inconvenience and frustration.
The decline in UFO sightings accompanying the rise of cameras on mobile phones has been more than made up for by the number of software failures caught in the wild, away from the comfort of home or office.
Getting social
I started receiving some failure screens via email from people who knew my interest in such images. With the advent of social media — Twitter in particular — people started tagging me in posts with failure screens. And I started retweeting them. Which eventually led to a moment of coinage in 2016.
Following this, it became just a @KevlinHenney, as you can see in many other examples.
Sometimes there is the suggestion of personal involvement or presence.
Although most are still simply mentions.
Since the Twitter X-odus, this has spread to other platforms, so people will also share with me — and I will reshare — on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and elsewhere.
There is a crack in everything
A not unreasonable question would be ‘Why?’ Partly it’s playfulness: it’s fun. Partly, I guess, it qualifies as a public service — rail companies are particularly responsive when they are @’d along with me. And partly it’s a reminder: software runs the world. This is something we are more likely to notice when it goes wrong — and particularly when it all goes wrong, as it did on Friday 0x13th.
Software is a carefully crafted illusion that invites the suspension of disbelief. This, I guess, makes software developers illusionists. It’s all about fabricating an alternate reality, to make real a wish.
Software is indeed such stuff as dreams are made on… but, of course, no illusion, dream, software, technique, tool, individual or company is without flaw or limitation — like Soylent Green, companies are made of people, and any system involving people is necessarily complex and imperfect.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
Software is the near-invisible breath of life that allows a lump of silicon to offer the experience of watching videos, of having conversations with other people (real or imagined), of creating transactions, of working with text, and more.
That is, until it breaks. When software fails we see the shattering of an illusion, the collapse of a dream. In failure, software reveals itself, smashing windows, breaking the fourth wall to show us its structure and how it was built. We catch a glimpse — and sometimes more — of the programming languages, code libraries and technology stacks and pipelines used to conjure the illusion. The development processes and practices around the software are also, if not directly revealed, strongly hinted at.
It’s not so much a case of “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” as there is a crack in everything, that’s how the code gets out.
