Category: Editorial

Categories
Career Editorial Programming

Here’s a bragging right that no other techie has

Now that I’m looking for my next gig (my last one was a victim of COVID-19), it’s time to revive this video that New Relic released a few years back to promote their application monitoring service.

Titled We Love Developers, it features some of the brightest lights in the industry:

  • Matz: Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language
  • Guido van Rossum: Creator of the Python programming language
  • Linus Torvalds: Creator of the Linux operating system and the Git version control system
  • DHH: David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework
  • Bill Joy: Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and creator of the vi text editor
  • James Gosling: Lead designer of the Java programming language
  • Sir Tim: Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web
  • Marc Andreesen: Co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of Andreesen Horowitz
  • Woz: Steve Wozniak, creator of Apple
  • Rasmus Lerdorf: Creator of the PHP programming language
  • The Gu: Scott Guthrie, creator of ASP.NET, Executive VP of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI group
  • Sergey Brin: Co-founder of Google
  • Dries Buytaert: Creator of Drupal

At the end of the video, they wanted to use the image of a more “everyman” developer to represent you, their customer. Guessed who they picked:

My photographer friend Adam P. W. Smith (my old business partner; together, we were datapanik software systems and we worked on some pretty interesting projects back in the late ‘90s) took the picture back in August when I was visiting him in Vancouver. I’d arrived a day early for the HackVAN hackathon and was sitting in his kitchen getting some work done when he decided to get a couple of shots. He poured me a glass of scotch, set it on my accordion, which I’d set down on the chair beside me, and started taking pictures.

Are you looking for someone with both strong development and “soft” skills? Someone who’s comfortable either being in a team of developers or leading one? Someone who can handle code, coders, and customers? Someone who can clearly communicate with both humans and technology? The first step in finding this person is to check out my LinkedIn profile.

Categories
Editorial

Looking at Ben Evans’ “Tech in 2020” slides, part 1: Always bet on the toy

If you read only one piece of tech punditry today, make sure it’s Benedict Evans’ slide deck, Tech in 2020: Standing on the shoulders of giants. Evans is a partner at Andreesen Horowitz (a.k.a. a16z), and it’s his job to try and figure out where tech is going next. Despite being 128 slides long, the deck is a quick read thanks to Evans’ concise slide-making style. More importantly: There’s a lot of useful information in them! I’m going to spend this week highlighting some key lessons from this deck.

Today’s lesson: Always bet on the toy.

The S-curve is a recurring image in Evans’ slide deck. S-curves describe a process that starts off slowly, picks up speed in the middle, and slows down near the end. It describes a non-linear growth process that you’ll see everywhere, in both natural and artificial systems.

Evans observes that the adoption of new technologies tends to follow an S-curve. In the beginning, a new technology’s adoption is slow, as it’s considered too silly or toy-like to actually be useful. Then it hits a tipping point where it becomes the hot new thing, and adoption ramps up quickly. Finally, the market for the technology becomes saturated, growth slows, it becomes “old news”, and people ask “What’s next?”.

Consider desktop computing. When it got started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, desktop computers were derided as toys. The fact that the IBM PC was developed by IBM’s Entry-Level Systems division indicates that they thought of the PC was something to tide their lightweight customers over until they were ready for a real computer. We know what happened in the end: people in offices found all sorts of uses for PCs, they became ubiquitous, and now they’re boring.

On slide 7, Evans points out that the history of computing technology has been a series of S-curves, with each S-curve spanning a period of about 15 years. The image above shows slide 7, with annotations that I added to spell out the overall trend. With each technology, the following happens:

  • Size, cost and power consumption decrease
  • Ubiquity, use cases, and power increase

With that in mind, Evans presents four major categories of what could be “The Next Big Thing”, which are:

  1. Frontier tech
    • Quantum computing
    • New battery chemistry
    • Neural interfaces
    • Autonomy
    • AR optics
  2. Important but narrow
    • Drones
    • IoT
    • Voice
    • Wearables
    • Robotics
    • eSports
    • 3D printing
    • VR
    • Micro-satellites
  3. Structural learning
    • Crypto?
    • 3G / 4G / 5G
    • Cloud, still
  4. The next platform?
    • AR glasses?

Note that all of these technologies are easily dismissable as “toys”, “silly”, or “not yet ready for the real world” — for now. If you want to be ready for the upcoming 15-year S-curve, make sure that you’re keeping an eye on trends in these areas, or similar topics.