Outside the FPGA lab, the hour every deliverable for the hardware project was finally filed — the half of engineering nobody photographs.
This is what the end of a submission window looks like. Every deliverable the hardware project required — the documentation, the forms, the artefacts, the version of the design that actually matches the board rather than the one from three revisions ago — checked, packaged and filed, on the day it was due.
It is worth a slide precisely because it is not the demo and not the result. Technical work is lost far more often at this stage than at the design stage: a portal that closes on the hour, a report that describes an earlier build, a figure quoted from memory instead of from the run that produced it. A design that works and a submission that is complete are two separate pieces of work, and only one of them is ever assessed.
The team split it so that nothing waited on any single person, which is the only arrangement that survives a fixed deadline and a group of full-time students. The consequence was that the last few hours went on checking rather than building — which is exactly the state you want to be in when a window closes, and almost never the state anyone is actually in.
The photograph was taken because the work was finished, not because it had gone well or badly; at that point nobody knew. Finishing is a skill in its own right, it is rarer than it should be, and this is the only picture on this timeline of it.
Divyakush Punjabi