When did tech stop becoming fun for you?
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@BlackAzizAnansi Just before I fired my last client, who was driving me nuts with idiot shit.
I've been slowly finding joy again, in my own projects. But mostly, I'm more excited about figuring our ink/paint blends that work for my screen printing adventures lately.
@BlackAzizAnansi idk but the first time I laid eyes on Windows 8 I wanted to punch Steven Sinofsky
@BlackAzizAnansi the actual unicorn startup I was working for hit 10M ARR and cashflow positive without taking on any outside investment. They used these figures to pitch a very nice VC investment package. The VC influence had them bring in MBAs and completely changed the culture of the company. Making a good product was deprioritized and all of the talent left, including me. The place I work now isn't much better in terms of culture but at least the on-call isn't nearly as stressful.
2006 when Russians bought LiveJournal.
@BlackAzizAnansi I'm not entirely there yet, but the decline started when a boss went all in on NFTs and then the metaverse and then genAI without ever pausing to reflect when the first two went bust and the third didn't deliver on what he wanted it to do.
And it's just getting worse with the last one colonizing pretty much everything.
@BlackAzizAnansi 4chan CSAM and mass murderers, Facebook-based genocides and financial predator gangs.
Webapps and SaaS. Continuous deployment created artificial time barriers preventing a lot of QA, A11y, security and usability testing and improvements. More crap went out the door faster until the world was full of JIT mediocrity, where nothing could ever be finished, secure, or feature complete.
@BlackAzizAnansi somewhere around peak MySpace.
@BlackAzizAnansi Back when Facebook and Twitter became not just one of many web apps and social media but the accepted de-facto infrastructure that a younger generation doesn't really understand were just better funded winners during an early period of "disruption".
When nerds building cool world changing things also had to have an "elevator pitch" for VCs to decide if it was going to see the light of day.
@BlackAzizAnansi When my employer adopted React.JS.
@BlackAzizAnansi Tech is still fun for me. In my day job, LLMs are doing a great job of sucking all the joy out of the craft of software engineering.
@BlackAzizAnansi i think the fun for me has been inversely correlated with the GenAI adoption curve.
@BlackAzizAnansi After 2016 and realizing all the tech oligarchs were using their resources to back Trump
@BlackAzizAnansi In retrospect, Prince was right to declare the internet “over” in 2010.
@BlackAzizAnansi It never has - I still code most every day even though I'm retired. But public-facing internet / computing for non-IT people is seriously fucked up and AI is making it worse.
@BlackAzizAnansi When I burned out & got fired from my developer job. I used to code for fun, but suddenly even thinking about JavaScript gave me PTSD. I deleted all those skills off my LinkedIn profile and never looked back.
@BlackAzizAnansi When Steve Jobs died. As big a prick as he was, he made fun shit.
@BlackAzizAnansi That is a good question. Because it certainly isn't fun anymore. I think I held on until Trump 1. Then all these tech companies that at leas pretended to care about society and the environment just took the masks off. It was OK to just ditch things looking towards a better future and kiss a fascists' ass. And all these tech guys saw it was OK to openly talk about their crazy theories and just spend in the open on terrible other people, companies and politicians.
@BlackAzizAnansi @timrichards hard to say, but it started becoming fun again when I moved to Linux for gaming and self-hosting everything
@BlackAzizAnansi Somewhere around Windows 11. Perhaps Windows 8.
@BlackAzizAnansi
When an OS update killed an older version of a graphics program I rely on, & now I have to jump through seven hoops to access any of the files created before 2019. (At least I have back-ups, but •criminey• I'm looking forward to the day we get some better, reliable file format standardization.)