There is a story that I read a while ago, and I often go back to it: it is the story of the Choluteca Bridge, or the “Bridge to Nowhere”, as it might be known. Some of you may already know about it, but for those who don’t, I will share its story with you now.
Story of Choluteca Bridge
In Honduras, a country in Central America, there is a river called Choluteca. Unfortunately, Honduras is located in the narrowest part of the piece of land connecting North and South America, making it susceptible to constant hurricanes. In 1996, Honduras decided that a new bridge was needed over the Choluteca River (Puente Sol Naciente or Bridge of the Rising Sun), one that would withstand the damage from storms and hurricanes, as the old one (Puente Choluteca or Choluteca Bridge) had to be frequently repaired. The Japanese company hired for the project constructed a sturdy bridge that was completed in 1998. That same year, a hurricane hit, as it often does in Honduras. The name of that hurricane was Mitch.
Mitch was a nasty hurricane, producing over 1900 mm of rain over four days, the equivalent of the previous six months of precipitation. The Choluteca River, as a result, flooded the entire region, taking the lives of 7000 people and severely damaging the old bridge crossing it. It also destroyed all of the surrounding access roads. What it couldn’t destroy was the new bridge. Instead, the river changed course. It changed its flow to such an extent that it now ran next to the bridge instead of under it. The bridge itself, with no access roads and the river running next to it, became a bridge over nothing, leading to nowhere.
So, what does this story have to do with tech? If we take the river as an analogy for the flow of technology, this new bridge as an analogy for a product bridging the gap between the customer and a company, and the hurricane as a single disruptive event changing the landscape of technology, it becomes fairly easy to imagine the consequences of such disruption for today’s products.
Disruption? What Is It Good For?
As you can probably already tell, disruption in tech is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that everything is changing. The evolution of technology, like any evolution, continually shifts toward the optimal solution, which is then widely accepted as the norm. So, in this context, disruption just means “an event after which nothing is the same.”
Putting the obvious miniaturization of technology as a disruptive event aside, one of the first disruptions was the introduction of the World Wide Web. It changed the way people perceive communication. Suddenly, a computer was no longer reserved only for enthusiasts and businesses; it became available to the general public, leading to the emergence of a new job role – that of a web developer.
When the first iPhone was introduced at the start of the millennium, it created another new job role, that of a mobile developer. Suddenly, one could access the World Wide Web with their phone and communicate using the screen in their pocket more easily and intuitively than ever before.
Due to the rise of the mobile phone and the new possibilities of HTML and JavaScript, one particular program was discontinued: Adobe Flash. Once essential for any web multimedia, and the largest victim of disruption up to this point (at least in regards to the Web), it has been supplanted by more secure and efficient technologies like HTML5. Developers specialized in Flash had to upskill in other technologies to stay relevant.
E-commerce, social networks, dot-com bubble burst, cloud computing, open-source movement, Y2K – all of these changed the way we think about and consume tech, so much so that certain concepts and terms seeped into the mainstream vernacular of the day as well. I remember the hype surrounding Y2K back when I was a kid, and it was a media frenzy that lasted for a couple of days at least.
The latest disruption is most definitely the emergence of machine learning and generative AI. The consequences are already visible, from different platforms (including Njuškalo) embracing machine learning and predictive algorithms to open-sourcing general, all-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance our work. And while we cannot predict all the consequences of this latest disruption, we can most certainly agree that it is a disruption and that it is already changing the way we work on our products.
Disruptions That… Weren’t?
For all the disruptive events tech has had, there is an almost equal, if not greater number of events that were supposed to change the landscape of tech and announce the Next Big Thing, but they were either ahead of their time or complete dead ends. Dead ends, after all, happen in evolution and go the way of the saber-toothed tiger.
Google Glass, Google+, iTunes Ping, and Microsoft Zune are some examples of products that completely failed, while QR codes and blockchain are examples of elements that were supposed to be disruptive but ended up not being so and basically adapting themselves to the environment rather than vice versa.
I feel the need to slide one important caveat into the mix. Blockchain is most definitely an emerging technology that hasn’t been proved to be disruptive thus far, but it has greatly enhanced our vision of the Web, to such an extent that some have started to mention Web 3.0 as a result. As of writing this article, while it has made great strides, it still hasn’t established itself as a major player in the disruption field. It remains to be seen what the future holds in regards to blockchain, though.
Hidden Currents of Innovation
Up until this point, I have compared disruptions to hurricanes, reshaping entire landscapes in one fell swoop. But there is another force at play, probably a bit closer to us as developers – gradual change. Picture it as erosion along the riverbanks of technology.
An example of such a transformation is Web 2.0. From what was once a “read-only” medium, the internet evolved, fueled by participatory culture and interoperability, into the user-immersive medium we know and love today. It most definitely had a larger impact on the consumer vision of the internet and its possibilities than anything that came before it.
Developers need to be mindful of this gradual change; otherwise, they might find themselves in uncharted waters. And when they embrace this gradual evolution as the norm, they can definitely stay afloat better, even in case of future evolutionary leaps of the tech they work on.
Internal Disruptions
It is not only tech that can disrupt a developer’s approach to a product. Internal disruptions can happen as a consequence of business policy. A product you’re developing for a certain use can prove to cater to a specific niche, which then becomes profitable, and as a result, something that started as one thing eventually becomes a different thing entirely.
Njuškalo started, and thus far has been, a classifieds product, enabling people to place classifieds for the things they want to sell. PayProtect, as a feature of Njuškalo, has been proved to be disruptive, changing the product to a marketplace where you can find anything you might need, basically providing the user with a whole new perspective of the product as a whole. As I write this, people are buying and selling things using PayProtect, completely safely transferring funds and receiving things they bought without too much of a hassle.
Building Resilience
Alright, so we’ve established that disruption happens. There is not much we can do about it. We certainly wouldn’t want to fight against it because if we do, we might just find ourselves and our products obsolete, like a bridge leading to nowhere. So, instead of “building to last,” we should think about “building to adapt.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that we should board every hype train we see. After all, as we’ve seen earlier, there are times when even the biggest experts announce a disruption which, at the end of the day, doesn’t actually happen.
Therefore, a developer needs to have a healthy dose of skepticism. Skepticism drives us to question the tech presented to us, to scrutinize it from different angles, to try to find vulnerabilities to decide if it is a good fit for the product we’re developing. Somewhat paradoxically, the same developer needs to be open to the implementation of such tech, which is a blanket term for being curious about it, being aware that it’s a disruptive element, and “being in the loop,” that is to say, well-informed. These two qualities represent a good foundation for a resilient developer.
On this foundation we can build other qualities, such as a continuous learning mindset and problem-solving skills. This leads to creativity, which then leads to a unique approach to implementing emerging disruptive tech into a product.
The skills a resilient developer nurtures and builds upon are useful for future-proofing a product as well. With experience, one can become almost prescient, seeing the different directions a product can take, and preparing an environment that can go in either direction. So, how do we future-proof our product?
Well, in this context, less is more. By dividing every feature into stages, and having an MVP approach where your feature only does what it’s supposed to, without unnecessary weight, and then by building upon that, thinking about not only the user but the developer experience itself, you can find that your product reaches an almost generic state where everything becomes modular. This modularity leads to proper de-coupling, and this de-coupling leads to a resilient product. You just need to unplug a single feature and plug in a new one, and suddenly you have adapted.
I’m probably preaching to the choir here. Probably telling you stuff you already know. And yeah, building resilience comes naturally to developers who are at the forefront of a living, breathing product that needs constant evolution.
At the end of the day, we just need to be aware that disruption is a normal part of our lives, we need to embrace it and prepare for it, and when we do, the possibilities become truly endless.
And the Choluteca Bridge? In 2003, they reconnected it to the highway, so it found its use.
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