What's This!?

I don’t have an RSS reader anymore. When Google Reader shut down, I briefly tried to incorporate Feedly as my daily RSS driver, but it never stuck. Instead, I’ve turned to a compilation of Substack publications, independent blogs, and curated newsletters. My inbox has become my RSS reader, which it was never designed to be (that’s a conversation for another day).

In my inbox and in conversations with other friends of mine who are also internet denizens, I’m noticing a trend: It’s the end of the internet as we know it, and it has been for a while.

The Decembers of my childhood were brutally cold. We lived in a converted general store and post office near a railroad in Waterloo, Montana. Our section of the Jefferson river valley was narrow. Bracketed by mountains to the west and east. In the winter, it was a wind tunnel.

Before our furnace was installed (sometime in my middle school era), we warmed our house with the three wood-burning stoves scattered about the house. I remember my mom frantically stoking the fires before we went to bed. No matter; our beds would be frozen against the walls every morning. Winter vacation during the school year was less a vacation and more an exercise in fighting off cabin fever while chopping wood.

I have a great fondness for journalism. The industry, the people, the organizations — it’s all fascinating and vitally important. My political and philosophical leanings lead me to believe that the tradition of having an independent and empowered Fourth Estate is key to a functioning democracy.  Even in the absence of my politics and philosophies, reading the news is fun. I enjoy reading about the experiences of people I’ve never met going to places I’ve never been. How odd.

So to hear that the profession is dying, shrinking, or changing for the worse, and to listen to the narrative get increasingly louder is cause for some concern.

This was one of the most eventful summers in my life both personally and professionally. In July, Garry (LexBlog’s COO) and I had a chance to go to Chicago and spend some time talking about LexBlog’s future product line and general opportunities for integrating with our platform. It’s not often that I get an opportunity to do face-to-face meetings of these sort, and it was nice to get back in the saddle. It was also my first time visiting Chicago, and Garry seemed more than happy to drag me around.

Engineers make hardware and software for humans. It should go without saying, but remembering and staying true to that axiom is complicated depending on where you’re standing. With each passing year, it seems that things get more complicated, more random, more uncertain. This year was no different, especially in the realm of technology.

Facebook and Twitter are defending their platforms amidst allegations that they were used for interfering in America’s 2016 Presidential elections. Net neutrality seems to be going by the wayside with nary a peep from the so-called “Big N”, many of whom participated in protests in 2014 when the issue first came to the public’s attention. Uber dug itself into a hole as scandal after scandal rocked the company; the first of which was a female engineer lifting the veil and exposing a misogynistic and Darwinian culture, followed by revelations that the company had written software to avoid local law enforcement agents in areas where Uber was prohibited from operating. Meanwhile, the threat of automation and the looming specter of artificial intelligence have every working professional worried about the future of employment in this new economy.

The list could go on and on, and doesn’t end when last year began. As long as corporate greed and bad company culture are not only allowed, but praised, problems of this ilk will continue. The problem as I see it, is that it’s most troubling in the context of computers.

This title speaks to my life for the past four months. For years, I’ve known that JavaScript is the language of the present and future on the web and for years, I’ve avoided learning it. It’s easy to chalk this up to a myriad of reasons, but ultimately, the two largest factors were intimidation and motivation.

Intimidation because my entire programming experience is on the server-side using languages that support classical object oriented programing practices. JavaScript is the antithesis of both those paradigms. A language that is compiled in a completely different fashion and relies nearly entirely on the client to interpret and run the code, while also seeming to generally laugh in the face of OOP and passes around functions like it was going out of style.

Ultimately, I had to admit that I didn’t know JS.

One of my more interesting decisions in life was to major in History (yup, with a capital “H”). Today, the only time that degree gets use is when flipping to one of the many books about the birth of the computer that are stored away on my Kindle.

Recently I’ve been reading The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation – if you’re interested in the birth of the communications age then this is the book for you. Bell Labs is a research facility that, at the peak of its influence, helped determine the outcome of World War II, gave us the transistor, and launched the first communications satellite. The way that we live today is in part owed to the people that shuffled through all the various research labs owned and operated by AT&T during the heyday of the company. Today, it is but a shadow of itself, run by Nokia (who, given the resiliency of their older products, are undoubtedly looking for ways to make a phone that can survive the crushing pressure of a black hole), operating mostly in obscurity.