How i became a developer from coal miner?
ennovates.com
ennovates.com
Electrician's workshops, as any workshop during communism, really, were hotbeds of what we would call today hacking. With low quality equipment but plenty of raw material, people would use their inventiveness to produce whatever the work required and whatever they or their extended families could use at home. Also they would fix tv's, radios, make antennas, etc. The mindset formed in this way is not too far from a programmer's mindset. (Remember, that at the time, there weren't too many programmers, even in the West.) Also, I've seen some very elaborate devices for grilling steaks and sausages (still in operation today) that people made in their free time at work some 30 years ago in some machine factory. As the communist economy was tanking, people could pretty much do whatever they wanted at work. Some people developed skills they could later use after the change of regime, others turned to alcohol out of boredom, some did both.
Just to add some background... Otherwise very nice story and kudos to Mircea.
ADD: With the risk of idealising communism, there is another benefit many people got from it, and that is a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism. Seeing all the mechanisms of state propaganda, many people came out of it with a well tuned bullshit-detector, easily seeing through the relatively milder propaganda of advertising, political campaigns, media, etc. The dark side is that a significant portion of that generation have become conspiracy theorists.
I've often wondered about that, traveling in Eastern Europe, are people there really less susceptible to brands? McDonalds, Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola, etc...
ADD: also, some people would go like: "OK, this is probably nothing new. Why was it in someone's interest to report this news now and whose interest was it."
I think brands are orthogonal to the question of propaganda in repressive systems. In fact, one of the main points of a brand in a free market is a kind of promise of predictable minimum quality. In a closed market that doesn't really work because brands don't compete and the feedback loop from the customer is broken.
I do wonder if such stories become less likely (more difficult) over time. Ever watch the movie The Aviator? Average movie, but what struck me in that movie was that you had someone who knew nothing/little about planes, learn to fly, build planes and build an empire on them. Try to do that today. The cost of entry, the licensing, the vastness of knowledge..forget about it. You could probably spend your entire life learning about a single little widget.
Software is crossing that same chasm. Simple "i could have done that" ideas aren't as frequent as they used to be (although mobile computing has rejuvenated this many times over). Building software is becoming increasingly complicated. You can't beat facebook without being better than facebook, you can't build source hosting without beating github. You can't build a mobile phone without copy and paste (well...at least, you can't really sell one...).
Bioengineering, purported to be the next wave, seems to be continuing this tradition, though not entirely dirt cheap to enter.
Only they weren't. As vain as we want to be the truth is we haven't reached any kind of technological limit. Creating stuff is as hard as it always was. Hard.
The facebook thing is a bad one. It's been mentioned time and time again that Zuck could have said the same about myspace...
Github also a bad one. They are a TINY. Github is awesome, I love them, but they are TINY. I think ruby and javascript are the most popular languages on github. Yet php is the most popular language on the internet. Point being, github is tiny, HN is tiny, Rails is tiny.
Feel good about all the opportunities that exist out there!
edited to add: For some motivation, here's what a solo modern inventor can do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
I have to absolutely totally disagree with you if you are talking about all fields. Licensing, regulatory and insurance costs alone prove a significant barrier to entry. I also think that as a field matures, so too does the body of knowledge and the amount of time required to become an expert in said field increases. Look at how much more a doctor, lawyer, or account needs to know today than they did 100 years ago.
I also think this is unavoidable in software..though I might agree with you that we aren't there yet? However, whenever I hear someone say "Well, X didn't have those features either when they shipped", I always cringe)
However the next great thing will come from someone who started off as a static site than added PHP (or whatever), then added more then grew to a grand piece of software.
There is a market out there for that little static site, and with stamina that site will grow. You can't do that with aviation.
With software, with websites, you don't have to deliver the end product right away. You can grow into the space. Even facebook did that.