A few articles that are interesting as a web developer/human at this point in time.
Your platform now has a million apps? Amazing! Wonderful! What they don’t tell you is that 99% of them are awful junk that nobody would ever want.
But that has changed. I’m hard-pressed to think of any paradigm shift, in terms of personnel, quite as drastic and rapid as the new role of the developer. With software being free and readily available, the sole ball and chain left shackled to the ankles of developers was hardware — but with the development of the cloud market, developers have a newfound stray-dog freedom.
What else? Humility and ownership. “It’s feeling the sense of responsibility, the sense of ownership, to step in,” he said, to try to solve any problem — and the humility to step back and embrace the better ideas of others. “Your end goal,” explained Bock, “is what can we do together to problem-solve. I’ve contributed my piece, and then I step back.”
But we can fix it, I swear. We just have to start telling each other the truth. Not the doublespeak bullshit of regulators and lobbyists, but the actual truth. Once we have the truth, we have the power — the power to demand better not only from our government, but from the companies that serve us as well.
I don’t really have any answers here—hell, I’m not entirely sure what I’m griping about. But I do wonder if our collective short-term frustrations leads us to longer-term losses. And seeing the web not as a “platform” but as a “continuum”—a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients—might help.
Thanks to @timothy_snyder and others on Twitter for sharing these.