I feel like I may have taken this answer in the wrong direction because I first interpreted it as a scenario where the web were to be sort of "reinvented", but below I'll say just what I might be coding on without "the web", as my current career/interests is so rooted in web.
That's a pretty scary scenario because for as much as we are threatened by corporate misdeeds and government overreach with today's web, you can bet that if things started from scratch today with the undeniable knowledge that the whole world runs over the Internet, you can bet that there would be power grabs the likes we never saw as connective technology was first coming up.
That being said, if we got the chance to start over, it would be pretty great to re-invent some obvious winning technologies in a way that wasn't so unilaterally driven by corporate profits, and I think Google and Facebook are the big ones.
Free market capitalism helped those companies become a thing because it's hard to motivate the thousands of engineers required to help out without the monetary incentive, but if we got to start over from scratch knowing we could beat these folks to the punch I think we could more effectively do it grassroots.
My current work, more practical in nature, tries to touch on these ideas while leveraging the interplay between grassroots development, software that is not built for egregious data mining, and free inspection and distribution of the source code alongside the capitalistic mechanics that help these things actually happen. I think my efforts are pulling the right levers in terms of overall contributions to the greater good, but with the opportunity to start over from a blip, I might get to take a more "radical" approach.
If I were to just code on non-web stuff (lighter answer)
I mean, if I had to apply my coding knowledge to a whole new domain I'd have a hard time passing up alternative energy as the place to be developing software. It's the one threat we face and I can't help but be motivated to code to solve big problems.
A lot of the science with alt energy is non-software but you can bet that in every challenge is a lot of software in terms of making processes more efficient, creating simulations, etc.
These days I support and follow projects committed to alternative energy, but if I had to go non-web I'd probably find out how I can make the max impact.
I feel like I may have taken this answer in the wrong direction because I first interpreted it as a scenario where the web were to be sort of "reinvented", but below I'll say just what I might be coding on without "the web", as my current career/interests is so rooted in web.
That's a pretty scary scenario because for as much as we are threatened by corporate misdeeds and government overreach with today's web, you can bet that if things started from scratch today with the undeniable knowledge that the whole world runs over the Internet, you can bet that there would be power grabs the likes we never saw as connective technology was first coming up.
That being said, if we got the chance to start over, it would be pretty great to re-invent some obvious winning technologies in a way that wasn't so unilaterally driven by corporate profits, and I think Google and Facebook are the big ones.
Free market capitalism helped those companies become a thing because it's hard to motivate the thousands of engineers required to help out without the monetary incentive, but if we got to start over from scratch knowing we could beat these folks to the punch I think we could more effectively do it grassroots.
My current work, more practical in nature, tries to touch on these ideas while leveraging the interplay between grassroots development, software that is not built for egregious data mining, and free inspection and distribution of the source code alongside the capitalistic mechanics that help these things actually happen. I think my efforts are pulling the right levers in terms of overall contributions to the greater good, but with the opportunity to start over from a blip, I might get to take a more "radical" approach.
If I were to just code on non-web stuff (lighter answer)
I mean, if I had to apply my coding knowledge to a whole new domain I'd have a hard time passing up alternative energy as the place to be developing software. It's the one threat we face and I can't help but be motivated to code to solve big problems.
A lot of the science with alt energy is non-software but you can bet that in every challenge is a lot of software in terms of making processes more efficient, creating simulations, etc.
These days I support and follow projects committed to alternative energy, but if I had to go non-web I'd probably find out how I can make the max impact.
Yeah, the "just code on non-web stuff" was the answer I was aiming for. :)