What a Water-Spraying Robot Taught Me About Software
Building AutoSquirt for Burning Man: constraints, chaos tolerance, and why hardware makes you a better developer.
AutoSquirt is a backpack-mounted semi-autonomous robot arm that sprays people with water at Burning Man. It’s ridiculous. It’s also the most instructive engineering project I’ve done.
Constraints breed creativity
When your robot needs to:
- Run on battery power in 100°F heat
- Be operated by someone who’s been awake for 36 hours
- Survive dust, impacts, and enthusiastic strangers
- Actually be fun
…you stop over-engineering very quickly.
What transfers to software
Graceful degradation matters more than perfect operation. AutoSquirt has three fallback modes. If the autonomy fails, manual control works. If manual control fails, there’s a physical trigger. If that fails, it’s still a backpack with a water reservoir.
User testing in chaos reveals everything. The playa is the ultimate stress test environment. If your UX survives there, it survives anywhere.
Ship the MVP, iterate in the field. Version 1 was embarrassingly simple. It also worked. Version 2 exists because version 1 taught us what actually mattered.
The meta-lesson
Software engineers who never touch hardware tend to over-abstract. They optimize for hypothetical scale instead of actual users. Building something physical — something that breaks, leaks, and gets dusty — recalibrates your instincts.
Build things that survive contact with reality.