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And then a bunch of complaints about building web-apps. SIGH. Why doesn’t the author try many of the other areas of computing? Game engine development, live

And then a bunch of complaints about building web-apps. SIGH. Why doesn’t the author try many of the other areas of computing? Game engine development, live coding environments, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, Theoretical computer science and algorithms, embedded hardware and low energy computing, mobile development, compiler design, FPGA development, computational finance, distributed computing frameworks, blockchain development, automated theorem proving. All of these areas are super interesting and fun, The author saying “Computers aren’t fun anymore” and then whining about web development is like me proclaiming that Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom.

bawolff 6y ago
I think its a bit of a greenfield thing. In the early days there was new interesting things to do everywhere you went. Now a lot of the low hanging interesting fruit has been picked, and you have to go deeper to do interesting things.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  There are still millions of small scale cool things to do. More than previously even. Go invent your own filesystem and write a driver with FUSE. It will probably take a week of work and will be pretty impressive to most people. Go reverse engineer the protocol for your rgb keyboard and write a program to change the colours. It wasn’t so long ago that I was blown away when I managed to make a crappy forum software in php. If you think computers were boring, it’s not a reflection on computing but on you.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I'm not saying its not possible, it certainly is. Just back in the day, everything was new and exciting, so you could get to something new and exciting basically without trying, which makes modern times seem boring in comparison. Its a relative comparison (probably steeped in nostalgia for a past that never actually existed), not a statement that everything is boring.
    - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      It’s is more a reflection on you/others than the reality of the time. As someone who is 22, I used to think the iPod touch was the most exciting thing in existence, mostly because I didn’t have one. It seemed to have limitless possibilities and games. Now I have access to all of that and more, it’s not very interesting anymore because it’s not new to me anymore. Point being, it’s not that things got boring, it’s just that boring is just how we feel about things that we have had for a while.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        > It’s is more a reflection on you You keep implying that i hold the view that modern technology is boring. I never say that. > I used to think the iPod touch was the most exciting thing in existence, mostly because I didn’t have one. Perhaps you don't have much to compare the status quo to. I would hardly describe the iPod as old enough to be part of the bygone era. Hell you can still buy the modern version of one. > Point being, it’s not that things got boring, it’s just that boring is just how we feel about things that we have had for a while. I'd be curious how you define becoming boring if not a feeling that the novelty wore off. That's pretty much a dictionary definition of "becoming boring". Regardless i think we fundamentally agree, as my take is that people view things as being boring largely because so much programming has become commeditized, where back in the day the field was less mature, so everything seemed like an adventure regardless of if you were looking for one. Edit: reflecting on this perhaps my view has changed, maybe the difference is the slowing down of moores law (and knock-off effects of that), especially for single threaded performance. I could use a computer from 10 years ago now without much trouble (ignoring certain specific workloads like video games). I think it would have been much more of a burden to use a computer from 1990 in the year 2000. Even just look at ui differences, windows 2000 is a big leap forward compared to windows 3.0 (which didnt even have real multitasking, only cooporative!) or MS-DOS. Windows 7 vs windows 10, not that big of a difference. Things used to change rapidly in leaps and bounds. Now its slow (albeit still steady) progress.
dsabanin 6y ago
I agree with you. I think there was NEVER more exciting time for the folks truly interested in computers and tech in general. So many fantastic technology breakthroughs came to fruition. Things that used to be available only to research institutions and the military are now sold on Aliexpress for almost nothing. $1 microcontrollers, robotics, hundreds of programming languages that one can choose from, IoT FPGAs, and so, so much more. And what's even better is that computers are now everywhere, so we are no longer building things that are locked in a box on your table. You can command real-world objects, move real money, alleviate a disability, change people's lives, and all through your code. I also believe that the most crucial aspect in all of this is that there's finally readily available, well-presented knowledge about all those things. Incredible educators and hobbyists in many of the fields mentioned above spend their days trying to get people interested and inspired and help them learn for FREE. Knowledge and expertise on most topics nowadays are just a few clicks away. I LOVE this.
Frost1x 6y ago
>The author saying “Computers aren’t fun anymore” and then whining about web development is like me proclaiming that Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom. I'd say it's more analogous to saying: Earth isn't fun anymore because I'm tired of North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Web development takes the lion's share of computing people pay for which translates to the work people will do (we need money for survival). There are opportunities outside of it but they're few and far in between and highly competitive because few people want to deal with the monstrosity web development has turned into. I've worked in niche industries that typically avoid touching web development for quite awhile and even I'm being pressured to reimagine these efforts as web applications, containizered, and deployed as microservices even when that approach is non-sensical in context. It's pretty difficult to avoid anymore from my experience. It used to be incredibly easy.
- ticmasta 6y ago
  >> Web development takes the lion's share of computing people pay for which translates to the work people will do (we need money for survival) This just isn't true. There are so many systems where the web component is just the tiny part of the iceberg you can see, but underneath some form of browser client there's a huge mountain of computer-based technology. Concepts like containerization and microservices are far bigger than the notion of current web development.
- feifan 6y ago
  Hello! I'm the author of this post wave This is part of my point — the majority of software time and effort is spent on web-and-related software.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
cjohnson318 6y ago
I agree. It's easy to grouse about web development and forget the bigger problem web development attempts to solve: how to send or receive data (or kick off a process, or react to some event) from any computer (or phone) in an human-friendly way. This is a big area to wrap your head around. Best practices continue to change, risks change, technologies change, the scale of demand can change. It's complex.
feifan 6y ago
Hello! Author here :) It depends on your definition of fun. This is my blog, so I'll use my definition — "fun" to me is being able to get my computer to effortlessly do things I have to and want to do. Flow state and all that. To me, I don't find most of these areas "fun". Interesting, worthwhile, valuable? Yes. Fun? Nah. None of these areas reduce the friction of using a computer for the things I use it for — tracking my budgets, life metrics, doing research and tracking my notes/thoughts, and ideally a bit of digital and IRL automation. Most of that (along with my day job) falls squarely in the realm of web development. Computers and software are tools; they're means to an end relative to my interests. Tools should at least not get in the way, and ideally they'd be a joy to use.
- drenvuk 6y ago
  You're ossifying and it doesn't seem like you realize it.
  - feifan 6y ago
    Perhaps, if you view it through my ostensible lack of interest in new computing technologies. From my perspective, computers have always been a tool to augment what I can do — gather information that my senses alone can't; crunch data that I can't do by hand; automate repetitive tasks; etc. Most of that 1) relates to web development in some way (i.e. you get the data from a website), and 2) has gotten harder over time as software gets in the way.
    - refactor_master 6y ago
      How exactly does software “get in the way”? Everything is more free and more powerful than it ever was before.
    - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
      To me, webdev seems like the most "unfun" morass of bullshit in the software industry. It's fundamentally awful technologies stacked on top of each other in rickety spires in fits of money-hungry, Silicon Valley ADHD. The modern web is gross, technologically, and abusive, ethically. If it's all you live and breathe, I'd probably feel the way you do.
packetlost 6y ago
> Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom As someone who's been working from his bedroom for the last year, this actually seems kinda true in a pandemic-induced depression sort of way.
mihaaly 6y ago
The article was about using computers of which software engineering is an essential part but only a part, having fun with the activity of one part - especially on specialist areas - will leave intact all the rest, facing it still daily and hourly elsewhere... What he did was giving an incomplete list of troubling components for illustration and not picking the key and only components to improve for final resolution. Also escaping to fun areas will leave all the rest - which are the overwhelmingly dominant part, used everywhere, everyday, by everyone - the same. Will not solve a thing but give the personal comfort of avoidance.
jjav 6y ago
I'd say computers can be as fun as they ever were. When I get a rare moment of free time to hack on my personal projects, low level CLI utilities generally, that's as fun as it was hacking on the same type of tools in the 80s. But the computer industry as a profession, certainly way less fun. In the 90s Silicon Valley was places like Sun, SGI, HP, Cisco; building custom hardware and software. One got to work on compilers, kernels, server code and network stacks and all kinds of projects where correctness and performance mattered. Rewarding fun work. Today Silicon Valley is Google (ads), FB (ads), NFLX (movies), Apple (cool, actual hardware and software product, but IMO too tightly walled-garden to be any fun). Now, of course, yes there are people still working on hard problems and low level systems but those jobs are few and far between, have no recognition anymore and don't pay well. To follow a path of career progress, it's just adware or dumb webapps.

bawolff 6y ago

I think its a bit of a greenfield thing. In the early days there was new interesting things to do everywhere you went. Now a lot of the low hanging interesting fruit has been picked, and you have to go deeper to do interesting things.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
There are still millions of small scale cool things to do. More than previously even. Go invent your own filesystem and write a driver with FUSE. It will probably take a week of work and will be pretty impressive to most people. Go reverse engineer the protocol for your rgb keyboard and write a program to change the colours. It wasn’t so long ago that I was blown away when I managed to make a crappy forum software in php. If you think computers were boring, it’s not a reflection on computing but on you.
- bawolff 6y ago
  I'm not saying its not possible, it certainly is. Just back in the day, everything was new and exciting, so you could get to something new and exciting basically without trying, which makes modern times seem boring in comparison. Its a relative comparison (probably steeped in nostalgia for a past that never actually existed), not a statement that everything is boring.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    It’s is more a reflection on you/others than the reality of the time. As someone who is 22, I used to think the iPod touch was the most exciting thing in existence, mostly because I didn’t have one. It seemed to have limitless possibilities and games. Now I have access to all of that and more, it’s not very interesting anymore because it’s not new to me anymore. Point being, it’s not that things got boring, it’s just that boring is just how we feel about things that we have had for a while.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      > It’s is more a reflection on you You keep implying that i hold the view that modern technology is boring. I never say that. > I used to think the iPod touch was the most exciting thing in existence, mostly because I didn’t have one. Perhaps you don't have much to compare the status quo to. I would hardly describe the iPod as old enough to be part of the bygone era. Hell you can still buy the modern version of one. > Point being, it’s not that things got boring, it’s just that boring is just how we feel about things that we have had for a while. I'd be curious how you define becoming boring if not a feeling that the novelty wore off. That's pretty much a dictionary definition of "becoming boring". Regardless i think we fundamentally agree, as my take is that people view things as being boring largely because so much programming has become commeditized, where back in the day the field was less mature, so everything seemed like an adventure regardless of if you were looking for one. Edit: reflecting on this perhaps my view has changed, maybe the difference is the slowing down of moores law (and knock-off effects of that), especially for single threaded performance. I could use a computer from 10 years ago now without much trouble (ignoring certain specific workloads like video games). I think it would have been much more of a burden to use a computer from 1990 in the year 2000. Even just look at ui differences, windows 2000 is a big leap forward compared to windows 3.0 (which didnt even have real multitasking, only cooporative!) or MS-DOS. Windows 7 vs windows 10, not that big of a difference. Things used to change rapidly in leaps and bounds. Now its slow (albeit still steady) progress.

dsabanin 6y ago

I agree with you. I think there was NEVER more exciting time for the folks truly interested in computers and tech in general. So many fantastic technology breakthroughs came to fruition. Things that used to be available only to research institutions and the military are now sold on Aliexpress for almost nothing. $1 microcontrollers, robotics, hundreds of programming languages that one can choose from, IoT FPGAs, and so, so much more. And what's even better is that computers are now everywhere, so we are no longer building things that are locked in a box on your table. You can command real-world objects, move real money, alleviate a disability, change people's lives, and all through your code. I also believe that the most crucial aspect in all of this is that there's finally readily available, well-presented knowledge about all those things. Incredible educators and hobbyists in many of the fields mentioned above spend their days trying to get people interested and inspired and help them learn for FREE. Knowledge and expertise on most topics nowadays are just a few clicks away. I LOVE this.

Frost1x 6y ago

>The author saying “Computers aren’t fun anymore” and then whining about web development is like me proclaiming that Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom. I'd say it's more analogous to saying: Earth isn't fun anymore because I'm tired of North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Web development takes the lion's share of computing people pay for which translates to the work people will do (we need money for survival). There are opportunities outside of it but they're few and far in between and highly competitive because few people want to deal with the monstrosity web development has turned into. I've worked in niche industries that typically avoid touching web development for quite awhile and even I'm being pressured to reimagine these efforts as web applications, containizered, and deployed as microservices even when that approach is non-sensical in context. It's pretty difficult to avoid anymore from my experience. It used to be incredibly easy.

ticmasta 6y ago
>> Web development takes the lion's share of computing people pay for which translates to the work people will do (we need money for survival) This just isn't true. There are so many systems where the web component is just the tiny part of the iceberg you can see, but underneath some form of browser client there's a huge mountain of computer-based technology. Concepts like containerization and microservices are far bigger than the notion of current web development.
feifan 6y ago
Hello! I'm the author of this post wave This is part of my point — the majority of software time and effort is spent on web-and-related software.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

cjohnson318 6y ago

I agree. It's easy to grouse about web development and forget the bigger problem web development attempts to solve: how to send or receive data (or kick off a process, or react to some event) from any computer (or phone) in an human-friendly way. This is a big area to wrap your head around. Best practices continue to change, risks change, technologies change, the scale of demand can change. It's complex.

feifan 6y ago

Hello! Author here :) It depends on your definition of fun. This is my blog, so I'll use my definition — "fun" to me is being able to get my computer to effortlessly do things I have to and want to do. Flow state and all that. To me, I don't find most of these areas "fun". Interesting, worthwhile, valuable? Yes. Fun? Nah. None of these areas reduce the friction of using a computer for the things I use it for — tracking my budgets, life metrics, doing research and tracking my notes/thoughts, and ideally a bit of digital and IRL automation. Most of that (along with my day job) falls squarely in the realm of web development. Computers and software are tools; they're means to an end relative to my interests. Tools should at least not get in the way, and ideally they'd be a joy to use.

drenvuk 6y ago
You're ossifying and it doesn't seem like you realize it.
- feifan 6y ago
  Perhaps, if you view it through my ostensible lack of interest in new computing technologies. From my perspective, computers have always been a tool to augment what I can do — gather information that my senses alone can't; crunch data that I can't do by hand; automate repetitive tasks; etc. Most of that 1) relates to web development in some way (i.e. you get the data from a website), and 2) has gotten harder over time as software gets in the way.
  - refactor_master 6y ago
    How exactly does software “get in the way”? Everything is more free and more powerful than it ever was before.
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    To me, webdev seems like the most "unfun" morass of bullshit in the software industry. It's fundamentally awful technologies stacked on top of each other in rickety spires in fits of money-hungry, Silicon Valley ADHD. The modern web is gross, technologically, and abusive, ethically. If it's all you live and breathe, I'd probably feel the way you do.

packetlost 6y ago

> Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom As someone who's been working from his bedroom for the last year, this actually seems kinda true in a pandemic-induced depression sort of way.

mihaaly 6y ago

The article was about using computers of which software engineering is an essential part but only a part, having fun with the activity of one part - especially on specialist areas - will leave intact all the rest, facing it still daily and hourly elsewhere... What he did was giving an incomplete list of troubling components for illustration and not picking the key and only components to improve for final resolution. Also escaping to fun areas will leave all the rest - which are the overwhelmingly dominant part, used everywhere, everyday, by everyone - the same. Will not solve a thing but give the personal comfort of avoidance.

jjav 6y ago

I'd say computers can be as fun as they ever were. When I get a rare moment of free time to hack on my personal projects, low level CLI utilities generally, that's as fun as it was hacking on the same type of tools in the 80s. But the computer industry as a profession, certainly way less fun. In the 90s Silicon Valley was places like Sun, SGI, HP, Cisco; building custom hardware and software. One got to work on compilers, kernels, server code and network stacks and all kinds of projects where correctness and performance mattered. Rewarding fun work. Today Silicon Valley is Google (ads), FB (ads), NFLX (movies), Apple (cool, actual hardware and software product, but IMO too tightly walled-garden to be any fun). Now, of course, yes there are people still working on hard problems and low level systems but those jobs are few and far between, have no recognition anymore and don't pay well. To follow a path of career progress, it's just adware or dumb webapps.