“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In the last twenty or so years of technological development, the world lept forward in terms of convenience, automation, and consumer expectations. But almost as outpacing those consumers, the demand for profit seemingly soared higher.
Looking for ways to gain more users, more market share, more extract-able value from personal data, companies like Google, Apple, and Meta created “walled gardens” with seemingly benign barriers to entry. Type in an email, a username, a password. Check a box with some “terms” some “conditions”, then site back and watch as your dreams come to life on a little rectangle that fits in your hand.
Fast forward to 2024, I grew up with technology directing my every day life. The internet and I have becoming one, dancing around my daily routine to keep in touch with friends, manage my workload, or simply finding hits of dopamine while scrolling to take a break from it all.
I had a username, like many others. I’ve coined it on almost every possible tech platform. Ranging from Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, even to my internal alias at work. This alter-ego of mine was my window into the digital world. But as time grew on, this window started to get covered in dirt and grime. I grew more and more jaded about the world around me. But when I would look around outside I’d notice a stark disconnect from the seemingly hateful, end of the world rhetoric I found online.
When I was 18, I heard about the “Dead Internet Theory”, then later the term “Enshittification” (see Uber and how their prices changed over a decade). Nowadays with LLMs, and deepfake videos it’s nearly impossible to filter out the noise.
Noise…
The root of all my jadedness. The seemingly harmless video of Mr. Incompetent doing something stupid.. a “prank” perhaps? Maybe at first, but as more and more and more of these clips would make their way in front of my eyes, my ears, I would seemingly go insane.
But it was more than just dumb videos on the internet, a poor design, or technical debt, or corporate politics, hell even US politics. The world was filled with noise, and I was sick of it.
But why does it have to be this way? Clearly it doesn’t. I know many intelligent people who also sift through the noise day to day, longing for change. But why don’t things change?
It’s because people are scared. Scarred of ripping the band-aid off. Scarred to look themselves, or more realistically their software, in the mirror and see all of the excess, the waste.
How many websites are out there? Many…. so so many. But back in the day, it was just HTML, CSS, and JS. Before that even less. But today? Today if you want to build a “product” or a “company” there are so so many things one must buy into, onboard to.
There is no relief. Until now.
I am going to build a system. A system for launching ideas. The popularization of “agile” of “microservices” and these concepts we tell ourselves are the difference between a fresh CS grad and a full blown “Software Engineer” was a wrong turn. Why must one concern ourselves with these more than once in our careers?
We never stopped to question binary, until the quantum scientists decided to mess around. But maybe we should have. Analog is great…
Still, no one restarts a software project, and re-invents binary. It’s constant, immutable.
so why can’t our infrastructure be? our stack? the way we develop code?
I’m not advocating against progress, in fact that’s all I want. But we keep re-inventing the wheel.
How many billing processors is enough? Auth protocols? API DSLs?
It’s relentless, we invent and invent and invent. But we never say, “hey maybe that one didn’t work” let’s go back.
Congress meets every year, and they write new laws. But how often do they go back and say, “hey, this probably isn’t needed anymore”.
But it’s funny, obsolescence is a very real thing. But only because we keep “re-inventing”.
If you understand what I’m getting at. Come find me. Let’s stop the noise.