Posted on 6th December 2024
I haven't written much on here lately. I thought it was time for a little blog summing up where I'm at now we're reaching end of this year.
Things are generally good
It's been a fairly busy year with three weddings of friends and family over the summer. Planning our bungalow renovation, and a subsequent change of plan, has been time consuming but it has culminated in some actual progress towards the end of the year. It's starting to feel like we're making tangible improvements to the property as well as making our lives a bit easier. I've also managed to fit in some work to my MG as well as getting out in it a fair amount throughout the year.
Winter sucks
As winter draws nearer I have had a few more unexpected issues with my car, like a deteriorating exhaust, which has at least given me something to focus on as the gloomy weather and short days have started to kick in. It's been a while since I've done any serious mechanical work, but I'm starting to flex those muscles again and it feels good. But despite this and getting outside as much as possible in all weather with my wife and our dog, it hasn't been easy to fight off the effect this time of year has on our mood. This is something I'm sure many of us struggle with.
The ebb and flow of creativity
I finished the UX course I was studying earlier in the year and gained a pass. I learned a lot and it was a really useful experience which I think helped get my creative juices flowing. Certainly it stimulated a lot of the writing on this blog during 2023-2024. I think it's also had an effect on the output of my work, regardless of my current role mainly focusing on software engineering.
However lately I've found the creative flow slowing down. I have no shortage of ideas for things I could write about, I just don't think I can turn it into anything worth reading at the moment!
It might just be the time of year, or it might be that I've reached a bit of a cross-roads in my career. I do feel I've been making a lot of progress in my general understanding of where the industry is and where it needs to go, gaining some useful insights into the nature of designing and building tech products. I also feel recently I've identified a few unsolved problems - particularly in the app (both mobile and web) development ecosystem.
A professional crossroads
My day job is ticking over fine and I continue to be proud of the output of the small team I work within. That said I know sooner or later, I'm going to have to take that next step whatever it may be.
Looking back over my career, I've acheived a lot. But I'm not sure where I fit into the industry going forward. I'm certainly an experienced and capable developer and I know I can deliver on a broad range of projects end-to-end. But I also feel I have more to offer and that it would be good for me to figure out this next step.
To that end I'm going to head to a local developer conference - nor(DEV) con in early 2025. It will be good to mingle with other people in the industry and hear what they're up to and what they have to say.
Nothing like a good rant to end with...
I don't mind sharing that I've always flipped at times between believing the job is just that - a vocation and nothing else, and the alternative - that there is something there in technology I really care about. With my enjoyment of working on old cars I have the pipe dream that one day I could spend my time restoring them full-time. Despite that, if you paid me money to work on whatever I wanted to, I genuinely think there are also some projects in the tech industry I would be happy to get stuck into.
What gets us down in the industry a lot of the time is we don't feel like we're building the right thing and that we're not enjoying what we do. I know part of what we're paid for is to get on and do the job, even if it's not interesting and potentially frustrating. But it's still demoralising if the output of your work doesn't have a lasting impact on real people. Even more so if the project, team or company is canned unexpectedly. Or what you're working on is costing people more money, to do things they don't need, while having a negative impact on other people or the environment.
We also often keep building the same things in software... over and over and over again. It's costing everyone a lot more money than it needs to. Developers generally don't want to get involved with things like politics and regulations. But some of us might have to grapple with these things if we want anything to change.
The lack of interoperability, the lack of collaboration and all the walled gardens in tech have created a situation no-one should accept. We are increasingly paying for amorphous wares we don't own and have very little control over, and it really feels like it's time to do something about this.
I don't think people in the industry can relate much to their users. Take iCloud, a fairly innocuous product on the face of it. Few at Apple would likely grasp the fact that the average iPhone user doesn't have much of an understanding of what iCloud even is. Yet they use it regularly and it is something they'll eventually be asked to pay for.
To bring into focus the power that a product like iCloud gives Apple, consider that those who do start paying for it will likely continue to do so for the rest of their lives. Many iCloud subscriptions will even outlive their original customers, because who would want to lose cherished photos of their departed loved ones?
So an iCloud subscription is effectively a debt that is being passed on to our next of kin. Of course you can transfer that data elsewhere, but that's a painful process, at a painful time which is going to cost you time and money. Your average iPhone user probably didn't realise their relatives would inherit that kind of stress and, while this kind of thing is now on the industry's radar, I doubt any of the original architects of iCloud gave it a second thought. It was just another 'awesome' new feature of the iPhone.
Another example I keep harping on about here is the whole mobile app development ecosystem. There were a few canaries in the coalmine of the software industry warning about mobile platform fragmentation decades ago and the situation has played out as they feared and continues to get worse.
Successive app frameworks built on top of two divergent operating systems, no matter how well they deal with cross-platform development, seem to just exacerbate the problem. None of these frameworks are likely to last long. They have very small teams working on them proportional to the number of developers using them.
Despite being hugely important to developers' and users' lives cross-platform app frameworks just don't generate much income for the big tech companies. Fundamentally cross-platform development has never and will never be in a single company's commercial interest. It's been tried so many ways for so long that I can't help but feel that the ideal of one shared codebase for apps targeting multiple platforms is not compatible or achievable with any form of commercial venture.
If you're not well versed in this issue - what this situation means is that the churn rate of mobile apps and services we all rely on (like parking payment apps) will be painfully high. I'd be surprised if anyone isn't already fed up with having to download a new app every time they want to use their phone for something. I'm calling it now: sooner or later a lot of important apps will stop working abruptly or alternatively will start costing a shed-load more to cover the cost of app rewrites.
These things aren't a minor nuisance - they affect our daily lives. One of the key threads in my writing here for the last year or so is the importance of the digital 'world' to our lives - it is heavily intertwined. Big tech companies should not be thought of as simply building innovative tech toys... they're building the entire world's infrastructure, they're shaping the future of every aspect of our lives. And every single one of us should care and we should also feel we have a stake in everything they do. Yet they operate outside the kind of scrutiny and democratic processes most other organisations are subject to.
I've no idea what the solution is to all of this, but I feel as someone working in the industry I can't just turn away from these issues and bury my head in the sand of the technical minutiae of whatever I'm tasked with building. Nor if I were to win the lottery would I feel truly comfortable spending all my time tinkering with classic cars. Maybe I do have something to offer here. Maybe 2025 will be the year. Or maybe I'll just spend the next year surviving in these crazy times we live in like everybody else.
Whatever happens I think I'll keep writing here. I feel my writing here has been of value, to me at the very least, but hopefully also to the odd reader too.
And if you are someone with the mental stamina to endure reading this post to the end... I wish you a happy new year whoever you are.