| There's a gap between developer culture and the giant corporate bureaucracies. The former is focussed on tinkering, nostalgia, tool-building, wheel reinventions, and half-finished build-and-forget spare time projects. The latter has successfully applied high-friction chokeholds around startup culture which makes the cost of entry for new business ideas far higher than it really needs to be. There is almost no blue sky development equivalent to the original Internet, the Mother of All Demos, and the desktop computing model - and associated projects - created at PARC in the 70s and early 80s. It's all very "mature", incremental, slow, and me-too. And so expensive, both financially and in terms of developer time. I'd love to see a renewed interest in attacking this from both ends - a movement to really push the imaginative limits of what's possible, while also being implacably humane and user-oriented and indifferent to ad tech, tinker tech, and pre-commercialised cloud tech. |
There's just certain things they can't do because their incentive is stuff you constantly pay for all the time.
I'd love to be part of something like old 90s revolutionary software.
But I've noticed close to zero interest from the dev community in anything like that.
Everyone mostly just wants to play with sorting algorithms or write their own small language, unless they're getting paid a whole lot. It's become a sport more than an engineering discipline.
It's hard to imagine Excel or BitTorrent being written now.
Heck, it's hard to even imagine web browsers with JavaScript being written now.
What kind of projects would you like to see/work on?