What tech trend were you sure about and why do you think it didn't pan out?
What I missed is that (1) people don't care about whether the government can create money whenever it wants, they care more about money with stable value over time relative to the value of goods and wages, and (2) Ben Bernanke must have actually known how to do his job, because the huge post-2008 QE didn't cause massive, economy-destroying levels of inflation as I predicted it would.
I literally learned this in Economics 101 in college, but I guess I had to see it for myself in order to believe it.
Twitter competitors - I'm still hoping that one day there will be a nice replacement that doesn't mess with my timeline entries order & no ads (e.g. paid service) - there was couple approaches but none gain enough track.
Mobile Phones - I was totally not interested in mobile phones 20+ years ago and thought that it won't gain enough market (temporary fashion) - I even said to myself that I will not have a mobile phone at all because I don't need it :)
Modern JavaScript frameworks - I was so used to "get sh*t done" while using just raw JavaScript + jQuery + jQuery plugins that I thought that modern frameworks (such as Backbone at the time, Angular, React) will be also a temporary fashion which will end very quickly because it was making web development (in my opinion at the time) a slower process and people will go back to 'classic' webdev anyway soon.
This all reminds me of the classic:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
next month I'll be joining a new company as a devops engineer. better late than never.
However, what I missed was that these jobs aren't about objective measures and efficiency. They both come down to trust between one human and another.
While it still makes "rational" sense to use online tools, people are emotionally invested in their retirement accounts and the biggest purchase of their lives. They want to be made to feel good about it. At least half those roles are to be psychologists, which at this point, cannot be done by machines or algorithms.
Won't make this same mistake with Elixir and OTP. I'm all in.
Elixir: FP language with Ruby-esque syntax based off of Erlang and its VM BEAM. Part of the Elixir ecosystem is a webdev framework called Phoenix which is effectively Elixir's version of Rails.
OTP: A set of libraries/utilities that are a part of the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem that help support building fault-tolerant and concurrent applications. It was originally designed for building telecom systems, hence the name Open Telecom Platform.
In my defense I’ve seen a lot UI Framework/libraries come and quickly disappear. But yeah it’s still going strong 6 years later. Which is about 100 years in JavaScript time
- app stores: the facts that they exist and people make money from it. From a user perspective ratings and stats seem to be of utmost importance
1) When the semantic web didn't emerge, I got excited by embedded microformats as a way that many of the same benefits to be achieved in terms of computable knowledge.
2) I was always optimistic about P2P tech until I realized that we live in a world dominated by centralizing forces, both governmental and capitalistic. P2P can't exist in a recognizable form without some centralization that allows law enforcement or capitalistic gain from the service it attempts to provide.
In both cases, I underestimated the control that governments could exert, and the power to capture dollars and mindshare that centralization due to corporate profits would entail.
You see that in the web itself. The demise of RSS, the demise of the personal website, the reemergence of walled gardens. We're back to AOL, albeit with three or four players taking the role of one. What are hashtags but scaled up AOL keywords? What are Facebook groups but scaled up AOL forums?
The web of those dreams will only exist in the margins and never at scale. Like ham radio or hobbies outside the mainstream that don't scale.
I also underestimated how much the average joe doesn't care about privacy. They'd give it up completely for a tiny bit of convenience. Nobody cares enough to desire a private/decentralized web.
I never thought consumers could be so shortsighted and wasteful.