Software and Other Shenanigans

Steven Hicks retweeted a great thread by Marco Rogers on “full-stack developers” a little before Christmas last year. I was starting to ponder a post on how it was getting nearly impossible to be a “full stack developer”, but the thread covered a lot more than I was originally planning to, so I want to use it as a starting point. My original idea was going discuss focusing on front-end vs. back-end development, specifically how front-end development has moved away from “be able to write HTML/CSS/Javascript (optionally using jQuery)”, while Rogers’ Twitter thread (very accurately) pointed out there’s much more to the whole “full stack” thing.

Much ado has been made about political advertising on sites like Twitter and Facebook since they announced their general policies around the ads, such as Jeff Jarvis’s take Unpopular Decisions and Ben Thompson’s Tech and Liberty. It’s easy to make this about the companies and the applications they offer, and to complain about how they’re ruining everything, but that strikes me as blaming online applications for the behavior of people offline. It also shifts responsibility for some of the problems onto targets of convenience regardless of responsibility.

I’m curious how many people identify with this scenario – to check all of your emails you have flip between at least 2 accounts, maybe even 3. And that’s just emails. There’s also calendars – again 2 of them, maybe 3 if you have a family. Most of us have multiple “identities,” each with basic services associated with them, like email, calendars, sometimes phones and/or some form of instant messaging. It’s the type of thing that’s been done by so many people in so many places that it’s ingrained in us as “normal,” but the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.