/devel

End of this year is here and for a creature of habits like me it’s time to do my annual review of this year spiced with plans for next one. As it happens this year was largely like last year and I could just post last year’s review with few changes.

I intentionally don’t talk much about my private life since I prefer to keep it such, but this year my wife and I had the fifth anniversary of our marriage and I feel compelled to tell how wonderful those years were and how much better each new year is. I am indeed a very lucky person.

Everything I said about my job last year is still very much true and I hope to keep doing it for a long time. My thanks go to my coworkers. Without them it could never be so rewarding.

Downside of a great job is that it can easily be too absorbing. My private project got less attention than I expected, but I hope to change this next year and finally bring it out.

I traveled less than I would have liked, but more than I should or expected. I did emit less CO₂ than the year before and hope to do even better next year.

I read more than 30 books this year and would like to read at least as many next year. The ones I read will get their own post in next few days.

I could also repeat my gloomy outlook on our planet. If anything, it is even more true today than it was then. There was no significant progress in dealing with any of the problems I listed and that depressing list wasn’t exhaustive in the first place.

We went to Copenhagen for COP15 and like many I’ve been profoundly shaken since its end. A lot has been written about why conference failed and if you haven’t read those articles, you really should. However it was clear to me at demonstrations that different NGOs might want the same outcome, but have radically different and often incompatible visions on how to get there, so it’s even easier to understand why collectively we are all failing.

Hence, it’s been another year of strange mixture of personal happiness and gloomy outlooks on future. It’s also another year where I can’t muster an optimistic closure to my review. Saturnalias are over, but I am not too late yet to wish everyone happy holidays and the best of luck in new year.

Recently, for a moment, I couldn’t imagine myself working on web in ten years time. Since I am quite passionate about it and its development, the obvious question was why?

Why wouldn’t I want to be a web developer anymore?

Popularity of Facebook comes to mind. It is no secret that I am not a fan of Facebook and similar networks. Yet I do have an account there and on some of its brethren. By the way, my Facebook account is for testing purposes, so if I haven’t befriended you, it almost certainly wasn’t personal.

Anyhow, Facebook and ilk are easy to criticize. Anything of that size will certainly gain much to be critical about. I also sometimes feel nostalgic about old web, before the gold rush of last millennium. That too probably says more about my age than anything else.

After some pondering I came to conclusion that I am longing for a sense of openness, equality and control I used to have. Few of us had our own server, but in principle with investment of little time and a bit more money, you could run all services that mattered.

Few actually did, since on the whole we didn’t do much. We do more now, some of which we don’t want public. I may not like Facebook’s walled garden of information, but I would have to be mad to argue for open access to all that private information. Even with existing restrictions in place people tend to trip and reveal  information to unintended audience.

If sharing our lives is what we want to do, which clearly is the case, then rise of brokers like Facebook feels as an unavoidable consequence. However that doesn’t mean natural development of a domineering agent should also be welcomed.

If at some point Facebook becomes a conduit for most of our digital lives, what happens if they revoke our account? To whom can we appeal? Who has access to the history of all our actions and what happens to it if we do decide to leave? Is it ever really gone? How do we know that our answers to this questions are true?

It’s a cliché that technology is changing societies faster then they are able to adapt. It is a cliché, but that doesn’t make it wrong. We are changing long before we are able to understand what those changes will bring down the road. It can be argued either way, but it is your outlook on world that will largely form your opinion on desirability of end result.

I am not an optimist.

I like building things and I enjoy it even more when others use them too. I am sometimes lazy and perpetually busy, so I avoid building things which not even I asked for. I always tried to incorporate a reasonable amount of security in services I have built, but I have never added transparency and accountability to the system without outside pressure. I don’t know many who would and that pressure tends to come from legal requirements. It’s a subject too dull to care about without painful personal experience.

Another reason for uneasiness comes from the other side of web connection – web browsers. Last few years have brought an incredible amount of development and most of us aren’t well acquainted with new technologies yet. HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript will trounce Flash and Silverlight, right?

They might, but they all might not matter. Two raising trends I find interesting are mobile web access and mobile application platforms.

iPhone and Android have more than 100 000 applications between them and my impression of these ecosystems is that many of them are not much more than platform specific clients to web services. Even if most of them might not have much to do with web (games, books…), it’s not difficult to imagine a future, where most of us would access web through mobile devices and developing native clients for a new service would have a priority over access through browser.

I can’t say this would necessarily be a bad thing, since web development can be quite messy and frustrating. It probably would be less egalitarian and less sharing environment and I would certainly miss that.

At the end of this long self-indulgent post I confess I have no answers. I barely have questions and I had to write this far to get to them. It is for me the most introspective part of the year, so I might be thinking about a non-issue. Time will tell. Eventually.