2018 is to 2008 as 2008 is to 1998
Posted by Noah | Filed under general, technology
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I’ll be doing in another 10 years. I’ve been at this web thing for a over 10 years now… I don’t know exactly when it was I wrote my first snippet of HTML, it was some probably time back in 1996 or 1997… I’m sure it was horrible.
I first started turning angle brackets into dollar signs on a full time basis in the summer of 2002, a little over 6 years ago (I did contract work, internships, and worked part time before then).
Allow me to tell you a little bit about the ol’ interweb job back then.
The company I worked with was on the cutting edge… of backwards compatibility, that meant that in 2002 we were developing for 4.x browsers circa 1997, Today that would be like developing for IE 6 and Mozilla 1 (as a focus!) so it wasn’t really a big deal it just wasn’t exciting. Tables and spacer GIFs were the name of the game (GIFs were still patented back then you know!) We used Flash too, we tried to publish for Flash 3 or 4, and of course we offered non-flash, non-javascript, non-cookie versions of pretty much everything thing because a surprising number of users back then thought they were bad. Some clients (especially in the the government) were in offices where they used dial-up to connect to the Interwebs from their Windows 98 computers with 640×480 256 color screens, used IE 4 with no plug-ins, no scripts, no cookies… o and they still wanted nice websites. Boy howdy did we deliver! It’s amazing what you can do when you have to.
If you’re wondering just how much things have changed in the way of rich content access I just checked the stats for a couple of popular wide audiences websites I have access to and browsers with no-flash access make up only 1.5% of the the hits, including those from mobile devices. Just for comparison about 3.3% of people in North America are visually impaired, 0.4% are legally blind, 1% are functionally illiterate. How often do you develop with non-flash users in mind? How about the blind or even illiterate ones?
So where is the future?
I see the bulk of the skilled development work shifting from a) making pretty designs, b) marking up content the client wrote, and c) hammering out oodles of non-interactive sites to developing really interactive rich applications.
This might actually mean fewer web designers, and developers over all; but let’s face it, at one time a lot of people made a lot of money by “thinking in fortran” and punching cards, those people didn’t die when the technology changed. We just need to be ready for the changes. A lot of the really dull repetitive, wheel re-inventing jobs will be eliminated, and the people who aren’t capable of moving on will certainly be forced to find new jobs, some of the jobs may move to emerging markets, but don’t expect “basic” web jobs to be sticking around here all that much longer. At-least not very many of them.
CMSs are getting pretty good, rich editors are almost decent and if IE gets it’s act together the lumps with that will smooth out pretty quickly. I’ve even seen a fairly convincing demo of a product that cuts up PSDs into XHTML and CSS automatically.
By 2019 I see development of the typical small business website going a bit like this (and I’m being very conservative here). A designer makes a layout (probably based on something from a library of wireframe designs), perhaps even in a tool which transparently works directly with XML, CSS and SVG (Or whatever code we’re using by then!) bypassing Photoshop (or whatever the big tool is by then) all together (in most cases). That design is point and click marked up for use with a template system and is then plugged into a CMS. The client will fill out the content, which I’m sure will still be difficult to cause to happen, even in 2019.
It’s already pretty close to being the case, all we’re really losing is the skilled work of turning designs into code and plugging them into a CMS, and don’t expect to be doing a lot of work writing CMS software either. How many people are writing new word processors these days? At one time that was the product of the future, Now you have three, Office, OpenOffice and Pages, and you can almost ignore the last two, actually most businesses do. I’m expecting an end to end Adobe solution that actually works, right now they don’t have that, but Adobe isn’t stupid, they’re just slow.
That means Joey McCodemonkey isn’t going to be able to eek out a living turning PSDs into HTML anymore; so what will he do? Well that means Joey is going to have to do what all those programmers who were writing desktop publishing software back in the ’90s had to do when that dried up. He’ll have to get a job doing something else, and for a lot that’s going to be outside of programming. Technology careers have a tendency to chew people up and spit them out. How many programmers do you know? How many who have been doing it for more than 5,10,15,20 years? Those numbers shrink pretty fast don’t they. It’s not like people were not programmers in 1989, sure there might have been fewer but they did exist, and probably in greater number than you’d think.
So what will the Joeys who can adapt be doing?
Well they’re going to be writing apps, web apps but we’re not really going to consider them that because it’s all going to be “web” apps, and you can drop the web because that’s not going to be important. You can call them, internet hosted applications or something if you like. The line between desktop and web apps is already under attack, heck Microsoft tried it with the whole HTA fiasco back in the day. More recently Microsoft, Apple and Google have all been playing around with web based office suites.
So what does it come down to?
Rich, unskilled-human friendly interfaces to important and interesting data, just like desktop apps today, just like desktop apps in 1999. Our idea of what good usable software means changes all the time. In 1989 color terminal based software was the bee’s knees in usable computer software. In 1999 it was rich GUI desktop applications. In 2009 it’s rich web apps. In 2019 it’s going to be rich interfaces delivered over the Internet. What will rich mean? Well I suspect it’s going to be ever more interactive and ever more social. Indeed John Gage was a genius when he came up with the one time Sun Microsystem’s slogan of “The Network Is The Computer”. It’s been lauded as an idea before it’s time, and it only gets more true with time.
Tags: futurism, rich interfaces, technology, the future, web, web 2.0
It’s Very Hard to Be Positive
Posted by Noah | Filed under general, technology
I’ve been trying really hard to be more positive lately, more specifically just to keep my mouth shut when I see people walking into the proverbial wood chipper; and I must say it’s very hard.
I wrote a post, a great post, it was about how nutty a certain group of people are because it takes them forever to develop even simple business problem solving applications. However I deleted it because it wasn’t productive, they’re not going to stop and I’m not forced to grind my brain into paste with their bad technology.
What was really bothering me was that they’ve got the corporate buzz and the jobs. They get respect from management types because they spend an awful lot of time and energy looking like they’re really working hard and are busy and writing really good software because they have unit tests and strong types, abstraction and isolation and they bloody well let you know. They take every opportunity to talk about, diagram and extoll the benefits of what they’re doing. In the end they solve the same problem at considerably higher cost and taking considerably longer than I feel is necessary.
Python programmers get no respect. It’s not like our code doesn’t get the job done, does strange things or randomly stops working. It’s not like we don’t have unit tests or that our code isn’t abstract or reusable, and if your code does the job and passes the tests why does it matter if it’s strong typed or isolated? Sure you can make academic arguments as to why, I’m not ignorant, I’m practical think about it, life isn’t an edge case, just because my variables aren’t strong typed doesn’t mean they don’t behave in a highly predictable way. It’s not like their code is based in science and my code is powered by magic ferries. They both run predictably and if you’re so inclined can be proven to operate consistently.
Honestly, I’m jealous. There’s a lot of jobs out there for Java, .NET (sometimes they don’t even specify a language), PHP and surprisingly Perl developers but almost none for Python. Which boggles my mind because it’s a very good language and most people who try it end up liking it. Not to mention from a business case point of view it’s highly productive, I guess it’s getting used a by people in the OSS community and on the cutting edge of a few areas of development and not companies like Initech who I suppose employ the majority of developers. Maybe right now it’s just more irritating because I haven’t been able to find a full time gig so I can stop consulting. It makes me wish I’d sold out and learned .NET or Java a few years back, maybe I wouldn’t even know how monotonous and wasteful my efforts were.
Tags: business, technology, the future
Why We Need to “Solve” Global Climate Change
Posted by Noah | Filed under politics, technology, the great outdoors
I don’t think man kind is causing global climate change, at least not through our cars and industry, I’m not sure the planet is even getting any warmer (or more energetic)…but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and solve the problem.
No we need to fight it like we fought the World Wars because of what it will do for us. That kind of human effort results in new technologies, new ideas, improvements in all areas of life. No the wars were bad, don’t get me wrong; but look at all of the fantastic technology that came from them and what they did for the human spirit.
“War bad, passionate effort good.”
So what if all of our efforts don’t change the climate? Can you really argue that it’s going to hurt for us to “green up”?
I want hydrogen powered electric cars that don’t need major service.
I want homes that only require a fraction of the energy to maintain a temperature and are safer. Fiberglass insulation has as much to do with not burning to the ground as it does with keeping you warm, think of what we might develop in the future! I’m sure glad we aren’t filling our walls with pop-corn anymore (no really, people used to do that).
I want a replacement for concrete that doesn’t require nearly as much energy to produce. Not so much because of the use of the energy is bad in and of itself, but because it would be cheaper, how do I know it would be cheaper? Because even if it was more energy efficient it wouldn’t catch on if it wasn’t cheaper. That, and because energy is expensive. The same way that stone went out when fired bricks came in and fired bricks went out when cement blocks came in. Better, safer more efficient homes for more people.
I want there to be oil left in 2108 so my grand children can have quality plastics and lubricants and “just in-case” they need it.
I want energy efficient bio-degradable cellphones and computers, not because I want to use less energy but because less energy means lower EMR and less EMR means less cancer, and biodegradability means I don’t have to pay someone to handle it’s toxic carcass.
We need to pursue this “green thing” because it’ll make our lives better, not because it’ll make it worse if we don’t, loafing around as a people will make our lives a lot worse.
Tags: economics, environmentalism, global warming, the future