Work Movies 1: The Everyday Lives of Java Developers, 2002, and Work Movies 2: The Everyday Lives of System Administrators, 2003. Video. 120 minutes.
Who is a Java developer? How would you know if you met one on the street? What is the picture of a software engineer’s work practice over the course of a day? What resources, inspirations, and artifacts do they employ, in what states of mind, with what concentration and how many parallel processes over what periods of time? What are their algorithms for troubleshooting and information finding? In the interest of learning about processes of the developer’s art, Sun Microsystems commissioned Strickland to undertake a series of video portraits. Dramatis Personae, shown here, is a compilation of excerpts from the collection.