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Is it really a good idea to be just as enthusiastic about tech now as you were then? Few things are what they say they are any more. Everyone's clawing at your

by tomc1985 6y ago

Is it really a good idea to be just as enthusiastic about tech now as you were then? Few things are what they say they are any more. Everyone's clawing at your personal data. With a few large exceptions, all the innovation goes to things make both us and tech cost less to management, or manipulate our attention, or track us because business types think theres gold in them thar hills. Half-assed attempts at things like "agile" abound so that we can please nosy managers. "Code as art" falls by the wayside as many of us are reduced to stringing together various services for a living Tech isn't fun anymore...

ddingus 6y ago
Sure it is! Go small. Embedded / retro / various micro controllers are a ton of fun, and they have most of the feel we all experienced back then too. A decade ago, I had a bunker. Unix, Linux, Windows, BSD, OS X, all piled into a basement running pretty much everything. It was serious fun building it up, and then when I got there? These dark times took a lot of the fun out of it. So, I literally gave the best away to a younger guy I could see drooling over the whole works and ordered some micros. Back to my roots. Assembly language was fun in the 80's. It's fun now. Hooking shit up to do things? Yup. Even more fun now because there is so damn much just laying around, and we can get almost anything delivered for a song too. Back in the day, I actually got good at vacuum tubes. That is what was laying around, and I was in poverty at the time. (Which actually was good for me personally, no worries, no regrets, no harm done) My point being: Seeing and channeling that excitement will pay off for most who experience it. Yeah, big brother networked computing is in a dark time. Oh well. It's a big world of tech out there. And, these days? Hell, we are super good at electro mechanical. So, a young person can get a look at that, learn to program, control things. Then, head over to bio tech, which will soon be electro-bio-mechanical, among other things, and likely experience a boom and sense of wonder at it all same as we did. I pretty much am against snuffing out those little sparks. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they don't come back. I would have hated to see my own snuffed out. At that time, I probably would not realize the impact. But today I would, and do not want anyone with inclination to self-learn, grow, do, build, experiment, teach, go into business, to lose any of that inclination just because we see some bad times right now.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
All of the things you listed are why I work in embedded systems / IoT rather than web stuff. "Tech" isn't fun anymore but actual technology is still fun.

ddingus 6y ago

Sure it is! Go small. Embedded / retro / various micro controllers are a ton of fun, and they have most of the feel we all experienced back then too. A decade ago, I had a bunker. Unix, Linux, Windows, BSD, OS X, all piled into a basement running pretty much everything. It was serious fun building it up, and then when I got there? These dark times took a lot of the fun out of it. So, I literally gave the best away to a younger guy I could see drooling over the whole works and ordered some micros. Back to my roots. Assembly language was fun in the 80's. It's fun now. Hooking shit up to do things? Yup. Even more fun now because there is so damn much just laying around, and we can get almost anything delivered for a song too. Back in the day, I actually got good at vacuum tubes. That is what was laying around, and I was in poverty at the time. (Which actually was good for me personally, no worries, no regrets, no harm done) My point being: Seeing and channeling that excitement will pay off for most who experience it. Yeah, big brother networked computing is in a dark time. Oh well. It's a big world of tech out there. And, these days? Hell, we are super good at electro mechanical. So, a young person can get a look at that, learn to program, control things. Then, head over to bio tech, which will soon be electro-bio-mechanical, among other things, and likely experience a boom and sense of wonder at it all same as we did. I pretty much am against snuffing out those little sparks. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they don't come back. I would have hated to see my own snuffed out. At that time, I probably would not realize the impact. But today I would, and do not want anyone with inclination to self-learn, grow, do, build, experiment, teach, go into business, to lose any of that inclination just because we see some bad times right now.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

All of the things you listed are why I work in embedded systems / IoT rather than web stuff. "Tech" isn't fun anymore but actual technology is still fun.