002 - Waves of Progress in Tech
Happy Monday!
One full week into life as a full-time freelancer developer and man, is it great! I've felt so productive!
It's made me think: there's all this noise around remote work, but really what we should be thinking about is asynchronous work. Being remote is great, but I think we've all learned now that it's not that much less stressful if you're still trying to force yourself to be productive within a certain window of time that is mostly filled up with meetings. Now it feels like that's just setting ourselves up to fail and feel terrible about ourselves.
There is really just something to not having to fit your productive work time into the hours of 9:00am and 5:00pm.
The necessary pre-condition here is having slack. (Not the app, which is terrible.) I'm not committed to 40 hours a week, so I can spend some time during the week not working. I'm also ahead on the projects I have. Both of those things give me a lot of freedom to work when I’m most productive.
Personal Update
Honestly, the biggest thing going on in my life right now is the new Taylor Swift album, which I’ve been listening to on repeat since it dropped on Friday. Taylor Swift is the Shakespeare of our generation. I 100% believe that. If you haven't listened to it, you should. It's brilliant. On so many levels.
Interesting Reads
A couple of really interesting things happened last week in the world of advanced technology. If just the thought of “advanced technology” makes you sleepy, then hang on because I think I can make this interesting for you. First, the United States announced a big investments in Quantum Computing:
NSF to disburse $75M between 3 new quantum computing institutes - FedScoop
In Push for Better Cybersecurity, U.S. Energy Department Outlines a National Quantum Internet - Wall Street Journal
Quantum Computing is one area of technology that I've had my eye on for a while, in part because it's just really cool, but also because it will radically change what kinds of things we're capable of doing. If you need a good intro, here are two of my favorites:
The other interesting thing that happened last week is this:
Basically, the government in Beijing announced huge plans to rebuild 12 major government services on top of blockchain. That's cool, but this is the astounding part: some 140 government services already run on blockchain. 🤯
Technological Progress
The news about Beijing's move to blockchain and the US starting to invest in quantum computers got me thinking about how these technology shifts happen. My big insight here is that these shifts happen in waves (based on adoption) and you can sort of see the waves coming and surf them. 🏄♂️
Looking back, the most recent major wave in the industry was the shift to mobile. The first iPhone was released in 2007 and in the 13 years since web traffic on mobile devices has risen to the point where now roughly half of all internet traffic is coming from a cell phone. While the total number of new mobile devices increases every year, the percentage of total web traffic has been roughly the same for the last ~5 years (about 50%). So we're somewhere on the far side of the mobile computing wave, which is pretty gnarly. (Did I do that right?)
We're currently riding the cloud computing wave. I would guess we're somewhere near the peak. This technological shift happens behind the scenes for consumers, who just notice the improvements in the services they use. This article from February is a great example: Cars.com is in the process of migrating from on-premise data centers (the old way of doing things) to cloud hosted services on Amazon Web Services (new way). The article casually mentions a ton of benefits, like their website load time increasing by 150%.
The idea here is pretty simple actually. You don’t buy DVDs anymore because you can stream them on Netflix. You pay the price of one DVD per month and in-exchange you can watch any movie you want. Well, companies used to buy big computers to host their website and run any big software they had. Now, they pay Amazon Web Services (AWS) and rent space on the big computers that AWS buys, just like you do with movies on Netflix.
The next wave is going to be in the adoption of blockchain technology. I don't mean cryptocurrencies, I mean implementing blockchains to replace labor intensive, administrative processes. We've reached this point where we're past the initial hype around blockchain and now people in the industry can more accurately assess where the technology can have an impact and where it can't. We also have more nuanced solutions than just cryptocurrencies, which I explain here. So we're starting to see early adoption in some really interesting places like Starbucks and Wal-Mart.
The next 10ish years are probably going to be a lot about how to build solutions that use blockchains on the backend, so if you work in tech it could be a good time to start thinking about this.
The wave after blockchain will be quantum computing. Because this is an entirely different kind of computer that still needs a lot of research and development, it's hard to predict when this will really become a thing. The CEO of IBM thinks we can get there in five years, but that sounds absurdly fast given that no one has been able to build them at a real scale. More likely, we'll start to see a few prototype quantum computing solutions crop up over the next few years and really start to take off in the next ten.
What this all means for you kind of depends on your interest level. I am currently invested in learning how to build applications that use blockchain for their backend, but I'm doing that because I think it's cool and it's been technically challenging. Plain old SQL databases just don't do it for me anymore! That's not true. I still love SQL.
End Note
If you found this interesting, I would love it if you shared it with someone. You can forward it to them or send them to https://hawthorne.substack.com.
Otherwise, if you have question about anything in here, hit reply!
Have a great week!
Zakk