With "serverless" tools like Azure Cloud Functions, you just upload a single free-floating function (JS in my case), and instead of you maintaining a server runtime, Azure is responsible for spinning up an instance and running your function any time somebody hits a specified HTTP endpoint. I was interested in using Azure Cloud Functions to avoid needing to spin up my own server on something like EC2 or Heroku. While Reed built out the JS front-end (available on GitHub), I was responsible for the server infrastructure to send messages to a web browser. If somebody wanted to sit there and spam GIFs as quickly as they could, we wanted to let them do that, but making their content start smaller meant their fun wouldn't come at the expense of annoying others. We simply set the starting size of a post based on how recently the author last posted. When you post a GIF or some text, it shows up on screen and slowly grows over time, but any newer GIFs that come after yours will cover yours up.
One other conscious design decision was to not rate-limit how often anybody could post. Along with that, it mattered to us that we supported all of the custom emoji that our Slack supports, since the community has built up a large collection of meaningful ones. The level of trust we put in our community (along with our real-name policy) meant we could also allow people to post plaintext messages instead of just GIFs. This handled a whole bunch of hard problems for us: authentication, mapping posts to real names (important to handle Code of Conduct violations) and fully handling GIF search (including explicit content filters). XOXO has an active year-round Slack community, and most attendees were already logged into the festival Slack on their phones. We decided to rely on Slack rather than build out our own UI. We wanted people to be able to live-annotate the music by pulling up memes the music itself was referencing, while itself playing into a sort of Internet-y vaporwave visual aesthetic. The goal was to create a completely overwhelming wall of GIFs and text. I had just started my new job on the Microsoft Azure Advocates team, so I took this as a chance to try out a whole bunch of Azure tech for the first time! One of the XOXO organizers approached Reed Kavner and I to make some sort of interactive installation to accompany the listening party: a sort of gif wall where listeners could post GIFs and other weird Internet ephemera as a way of annotating the piece. If you're not familiar with Neil's work, his previous album Mouth Moods might give you an idea of what was played: a weird and surprising concept album that sort of amounts to cramming an excessive amount of Pure Internet™ into your ear through mashups, references, and very clever mixing.
At this year’s XOXO festival, one of the top-secret closing party happenings was a special live listening of Neil Cicerega's latest mashup album.
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