Week 11 Dig: The restoration

Minimum intervention — reviving one piece of your dig site the way a conservator restores a painting: stabilise, do not repaint.

3 May 2027

Before the dig#

Choose one specific feature or module of your dig site to restore. Not the whole project — one piece. The choice itself is a finding: which part is worth saving?

Criteria for choosing:

• Small enough to restore in one session (a function, a component, a CLI command)
• Representative of the project’s purpose (not a test helper or a config file)
• Broken for a diagnosable reason (a missing dependency, a changed API, a deprecated language feature)

In the session#

Restore your chosen piece. The principle is minimum intervention: change only what is necessary to make it work. Do not refactor, do not modernise, do not add features. A conservator stabilises a painting; they do not repaint it.

Document every change you make, in order, with a one-sentence justification.

Afterwards#

Push your restoration as a branch or fork. The diff is part of your exhibit submission. Write 200 words on what you changed, what you deliberately did not change, and why the distinction matters.