The AndPlus Software Development Blog

Consider the lowly umbrella: A mundane object, often cheaply made and inexpensively acquired, and with a singular habit of failing to do the job it was designed for. In anything but a light rain that falls straight down, an umbrella—even one of those big golf umbrellas—will keep very little of you dry. And if you’re sharing it with someone, forget it. As the Police sang many years ago, “It’s a big enough umbrella, but it’s always me that ends up getting wet.” It’s a wonder anyone uses the dadgum things at all.

It’s hard to believe, but Twitter is 12 years old this year. Remember when it was new? At the time, a whole lot of people wrote it off as a solution in search of a problem. Who, in their right mind, would want to participate in a service whose only function was to enable people to share their most mundane thoughts with each other, and with the world at large, in 140-character chunks?

The grand vision for human-computer interaction in recent years has been mobility: Users with lightweight, low-power “dumb terminals” communicating with cloud services via ubiquitous and speedy wireless connections to perform every computing task imaginable, from email and web surfing to more computationally intensive tasks such as video editing and big-data analytics. All of this, of course, would be courtesy of the cloud; there would no longer be any need, outside of perhaps gaming, for laptops and desktops with super-powerful, multicore processors.

Fun fact: “dogfood” (one word) has become a verb, at least in the business slang lexicon. “Dogfooding” is synonymous with “eating one’s own dog food,” which in turn refers to a business’s practice of using its own products—the same products it manufactures and sells to its customers—in the conduct of its business. This practice is generally considered a healthy sign for a business—how can you trust a business that uses its competitors’ products? It has a dark flip side, however: “not invented here,” the refusal to use someone else’s technology simply because your business didn’t come up with it, even if your own equivalent technology is inferior or nonexistent.

What happens when you take an activity that is traditionally controlled or managed by a central system or authority, and distribute that control into the hands of larger communities?

Computer scientists, by and large, are not considered particularly artistic. When you spend your time in the world of bits and bytes, algorithms and loops, and nodes and edges, you may not think much about aesthetics. To the extent that you do, you might think, “How can I get a computer to create an image or a song or a poem by itself?”