🕸️ the future

or, the “building a new internet” part.

tl;dr


climatetech

“Climate and sustainability is going to be the new computer science” — John Doerr

i have a separate doc just for this important topic: 🌳 Climatetech Landscape 2023💻


projects to keep on eye on


everything old is new again

so, this guide is obviously about writing complex apps with “thick” clients that have javascript running browser-side. however, there is a trend to go back to “how things used to be” with thinner clients and running things more on the server-side. these thought leaders aren’t necessarily wrong! we’ve been oscillating between server→client→server and i think this is a healthy criticism on how things maybe have gotten out of hand on the complexity of frontend projects (i mean, hell, i had to write this whole guide meant to navigate this complex landscape!)

here are tech projects to watch as this trend continues:

if you wanna read an absolutely brutal takedown of the current untenable, complex state of frontend read The Market for Lemons.


ai/ml

  • GitHub Copilot: helps you write code more quickly. wield wisely though: with great power… comes less understanding of the underlying principles 😉

resources


decentralization

our current Internet has become highly centralized, with your data being held up in silos like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. imagine how incredibly stupid it would be if you used Gmail but your friend used Yahoo’s mail and you couldn’t email each other because you used different services. email works because it doesn’t care what service or your friend picked: it nevertheless lets you communicate with others using different companies.

The X-FilesThe X-Files

now think of how insanely dumb it is that just because you choose MySpace, another friend chooses Friendster, and yet another friend chooses Facebook, you cannot communicate, share photos and “be friends”. (all this, of course, is on top of the fact that a lot of these sites profit off of you and your data.) we need to work hard to think of a world that lets users break down these corporate walls and offer interoperability with each other, instead of siloing people into a single service.

i’ve been following (and contributing) the work of decentralization, the work to make the Internet as it was intended to be. while it’s made great strides in recent years, it has a long way to go and definitely could use your help and passion. it behooves you to start thinking ahead to a world where your users don’t feel stuck to the platform you’re creating.

here are some efforts currently underway that are interesting to follow:

further reading: