Comments: Third Time's the Charm: Deprecating KAWS

[mdole]

How do you tell when it's time to deprecate a system? If something mostly works OK, is it worth spending time and effort replacing its functionality?

At Artsy, we realized several years ago that we needed to be able to group a bunch of artworks together. If we wanted to have a page with all of the ceramics by Lucio Fontana, or contemporary prints from the IFPDA Fair Sprint 2022, or a gift guide curated by Antwaun Sargent, we needed to have a way to make that happen.

We decided to call these things "collections," a reasonable name for a collection of artworks. In order to create them, we developed a service called KAWS, named after the artist (whose works we wanted to put in several of these collections).

Now, 4 years later, we've taken down the service and folded its functionality into Artsy's main database and API, Gravity.

Let's talk about why and what we learned along the way.

[pvinis]

also, let's just appreciate for a second, the amazing announcement that @mdole did on our slack. he had many updates along the way, but the first one was just :chefkiss:, with info on how to revert if things went south etc.

[artsy-mike]

🤘🏼