Web 2.0
Some people think Web 2.0 is just hype, or that is it all about AJAX. However, I find that Web 2.0 touches my life on a daily basisis. I habitually use del.icio.us to bookmark sites for myself, but also for others – it is a great way to share information with others. Also, I am currently working on a project that uses a private Wiki at Wikispaces to share and create project information.
I am often asked to write code that already exists, or to provide functionality that is already available as an online service. Just recently, I was asked to develop a survey tool for my client’s website. I refered the client to SurveyMonkey. Some developers might see this as a dangerous trend, but I remain convinced that there is new territory for us to conquer. I am not interested in doing the same work over and over again. I built my first survey tool in the 1990s for a market research firm.
The challenge for old farts like me is to innovate, and to keep learning. The kids who are coming up behind me have some great new ideas, and I love it. Or, should I say: I digg it
Le plus ça change
As I seem to be fond of recalling, a long time ago, I was a Visual Basic programmer. In those days, I wrote useful business applications for market research firms. When I would discuss my code with Java programmers, I can recall their criticism of Visual Baisic: it is NOT truly object oriented.
I was amused to see the Spring framework – that is the way I had to program in VB, but I did not call it inversion of control. Today, I was flipping through Head First Design Patterns, and I was amused to see the design principle on page 23: Favor composition over inheritance. In VB, I did not have a choice, but I was happy and productive, and so were my clients.
That does not mean that I have no use for inheritance, but I have seen it over used. I am happy to see that my gut feelings about the Java code I was seeing about 10 years ago were on the money. I have been wrong about so many other things, it is nice to have been right about something.
VB did support interfaces, but this did mean that the programmer had to provide the implementation every time. I implemented my behavior as an object, and often passed the behavior in at runtime. That is what I had to do Рnow it is the hottest new way of doing things. Le plus ̤a change . . .
Where Is The Poetry?
Somewhere I have a journal I used to write in when I was twenty years old. In it, I agonized about changing my major from political science to computer science. I was drawn to technology, and I saw something in it that still mazes me. I think I wrote that the computer would become the tool that would reintroduce or recreate the renaissance man (or woman). I imagined creativity of a new sort, and such creations.
I was right, and that was visionary, but look what happened to me! I became so enthralled by the computer that I abandoned the creativity that used to be so important to me – I use all of my creativity in my code, but not even my clients see that or understand that. My code is not seen or scrutinized by anybody, and I do not even keep it – it is not mine to keep, and, frankly, I have no use for it. That is just it – I have no use for the things I create, and I do not create things for myself.
Do not misunderstand: I love my work, but this is not what I set out to do. I used to write poetry, draw, write songs and sing. I read so-called literature. I even read philosophy, but now I read about things that are obscure to most of the people I am tempermentally drawn to. I have become preoccupied with the tools themselves, and less interested or involved in those things I set out to create as a young man. Am I unhappy with my choices? No, but I miss the old me.
What makes Web 2.0 interesting is that it is less about the technology and more about the uses of technology. I like blogging. I like my social bookmarks. I love Wikipedia, and Wikis in general.
A couple of weeks ago, Juan O’Neill, someone I knew in the Ottawa poetry scene over 20 years ago died. I saw Juan a few months ago at a health food store and he invited me to come out to read at the Sasquatch poetry reading series. I was too busy, and to involved in my family and in my recovery from heart failure, and I missed the chance to show him what I wrote while I was away in Vancouver during the nineties.
I could have printed some poems and attended an open reading, but I spent my time reading about Django and CherryPy, neither of which I use. Sure, I like what I do, but technology is killing part of me. It is choking me off. Now that I have a medical condition that comes with a diminished life expectancy, I am thinking about this part of me that has been choked off.
My friend, Marty Flomen, who was also a poet and computer consultant died in the nineties of heart failure and kidney problems. As far as I know, he struggled for 15 years with the disease. My father recently died, and so did my mother. Juan just died. This is more than a mid-life crisis, but let’s call it that.
Am I living the life I was called to live? I happen to believe that death is not the end, and that there is more, but I also believe that it matters how we fill our days. God cares. How we choose fill our days tells us who we are.
Wait for it! Here it comes, the inevitably mundane and yet compellingly profound question: who am I? What have I become? Is this who I want to continue being, or is there more inside me that still wants to come out?
What has been fulfilled in our lives in satisfying, and it should be, but a life worth living has to be lived for what has not been fulfilled – that is how I think we were designed. Not even God rests on the things He created in the first seven days of the World. God creates every day, and I believe that He yearns for us. Love is about yearning, not just about being satisfied. Love is not a done deal. It is a continuing creative act.
So, what am I to do with with this technology I love? I do not think I want to quit to write plays, or anything like that, but I do want to get back in touch with the impulse that drove me to become interested in computers twenty-six years ago. That impulse had more to do with what was inside the mind and the soul of Man than it has to do with what was inside the computer. I feel as if I became mesmerized by the inner-workings of a clock, and forgot all about my appointments.
Knowing how to keep better time is not the same as having a better time. As Neil Postman was inclined to believe and say, technology often represents nothing more than an improved means to an unimproved end. As much as I enjoy clever things, and as much I can become distracted by the inner-workings of certain digital artifacts, I am feeling a longing to embrace the first thing that drew me to technology: the potential to achieve something better not just the ability to achieve the some old things faster or more efficiently.
This is a feeling – it will either lead to something, or it will not.