From childhood through young adulthood, I was enamored with PCs, the web, and the things you could do and learn with them. Now that I’m older and work in the industry, neither of these things bring me the joy they used to. I suspect many on HN may find themselves in a similar position. If so, what emerging technologies give you the same thrill that the early days of personal computing or the web did?
To be honest I don't get the same thrill from tech, and I don't expect to.
My younger self was discovering new things, and pushing rather boundaries of what I could do... pleasure came from the mastering of some new skill or technique.
I've been doing it a long time now, so there are limits to that pleasure now. I still enjoy new projects, especially if the come with technical challenges, but its not the same as before.
But that's why hobbies exist. 3 years ago I took up ceramics. Learning to craft things from clay, pushing the boundaries of my skillset with every piece brings its own pleasure.
We find satisfaction everywhere, not just work, and not just tech. Always be learning something new. Take up a musical instrument for the first time, learn to cook, grow a plant, play golf, get married, have children, volunteer somewhere, bake bread.
Tech is my day job, and I still enjoy building it. But the world is full of opportunities to grow in all kinds of areas.
Surprisingly, I still get a buzz from learning new tricks on Linux.
Back in the early 2000's as a practicing psychotherapist, a colleague had her laptop stolen from her car with her client files. At the time even I knew that there was a recovery disk called "trinity rescue" that removed the password from windows machines.
This for me was the drive to learn about encryption, privacy and security especially when managing confidential stuff like client files.
So. full disk encryption was the beginning to a whole new world for me. Bring on Linux. Dumped my old windows 95 and windows ME operating systems and installed Linux. Ubuntu and Linux mint back then.
I must say that more and more counsellors and psychotherapists are returning to paper files locked in secure containers. As we have all learnt over the years, nothing is safe online or on your PC, laptop. For without confidentiality there is no trust.
In the early days of the internet I noticed that my sisters wifi password was her surname and post code, so I started looking onto wifi hacking. 6 digit passwords were the norm back then, how times have changed. This is the arena I learned most about linux and its tools.
The buzz of getting the hash with aircrack-ng and then running hashcat or JTR to crack it. Building very large password databases. learned basic sed, awk, grep, sort, bash scripting etc.
Even though I was in my 40's then, it definitely appealed to the 15 year old introvert inside me. I never had any intention to do anything criminal, it was, for me, always just the challenge.
Plus being a psychotherapist, all that empathy and humanity back then, for balance sake, I needed to use and develop the other hemisphere of my brain.
Linux and open source for me is still the way to an egalitarian free society.
The linux society way versus the Microsoft society way.
Recently I found and installed the rust version of coreutils.
I promote linux to everyone I meet. I install it for anyone who is interested.
Nothing on the computer does any more. There's too much overhead, too much administrivia, too much regulation to feel the same as popping up a Perl script into the CGI-BIN via FTP once did.
To some degree, I scratch that same itch and feel the excitement of creation manufacturing physical goods at home now. A laser cutter, 3D printer, sublimation printer and heat press are the tools. I'm designing parts and having the laser/printer produce them, like writing code and seeing an app run.
I concur with making things, I get as much joy from learning new crafts now as I ever did from programming.
I still very much enjoy programming, too - probably more than ever. I attribute that to going deeper.
When I was doing CAD I went all over the technology map from UI to middleware to memory, file systems, graphics and hardware (GPUs before they had the name).
When doing “web” HTML was an entry point that lead to going deep into HTTP, web server scaling, DNS and so on.
Delving into hardware design, lightly into embedded programming, and even chip level design. And into physical networking and IP, and many of the low-level application protocols like RADIUS, Netflow, SNMP, syslog and all.
Home server. I was running a home media server on an Ubuntu derivative but I switched to Open Media Vault after my Ethernet port became corrupted in the OS. Now most of my services are in their own docker containers.
My younger self was discovering new things, and pushing rather boundaries of what I could do... pleasure came from the mastering of some new skill or technique.
I've been doing it a long time now, so there are limits to that pleasure now. I still enjoy new projects, especially if the come with technical challenges, but its not the same as before.
But that's why hobbies exist. 3 years ago I took up ceramics. Learning to craft things from clay, pushing the boundaries of my skillset with every piece brings its own pleasure.
We find satisfaction everywhere, not just work, and not just tech. Always be learning something new. Take up a musical instrument for the first time, learn to cook, grow a plant, play golf, get married, have children, volunteer somewhere, bake bread.
Tech is my day job, and I still enjoy building it. But the world is full of opportunities to grow in all kinds of areas.