John

During my first decade as a programmer, I had an article I wrote published in a national user’s group magazine. It was a quarterly periodical.

I was thinking of writing a book someday and getting it published too. These days, I do not think that would be worth my time.

Half a decade ago, I began entertaining the idea of writing a book about computer programming.

I have been a programmer for a quarter century. I have learned many languages, many computing technologies, and learned many valuable lessons.

However, the computer books trade seemed to drop off after a real boom period in the 1990s. Turns out that opportunities for authors to make a lot of money at it have dropped off due to declining sales.

The first reason for this is pretty simple. Why invest forty dollars or whatever on something that is going to take up space in your home or office for a few years and then wind up in a landfill when you can get much of the same tutorials, examples, and reference information on the web for free?

The second reason is kind of tragic. People are reading less today in our society than they used to read. So, that cuts even more deeply into a potential market.

The third reason is that computer books become obsolete very quickly. Used bookstores and the public library in my area will not even consider accepting any computer books. That makes people slightly more reluctant to buy them. They are a short term investment at best. More realistically, they are simply a cost of doing business.

So I have lost my desire to write a book.

I think in general computer programmers should keep somewhat abreast with certain web technologies.

Keeping up with all of them is impossible. There are too many. Even keeping track of them is a handful. Even some major trends will just tend to be a fad.

I taught myself most of the core web technology in use today from about 1994-2002. I learned most pieces of it before it became into widespread use.

That is sort of okay. It opened doors for me to use them professionally before a lot of developers got a chance to do that.

On the other hand, I had to deal with lots more bugs and compatibility problems than those who learned this tech later had to do. When these problems with the technology arose, I generally got to play human shock absorber more than I would have liked.

Along the way, I learned some technologies that will probably never get much acceptable. Those probably wasted some of my research, experimentation, and study time at home.

Since there is so much web technology out there you just cannot learn all of it. If you have pick some areas in which you want to be well-informed or skillful.

Social web was a big trend in 2004-2006, for example. However, I think it turned out to be far, far less sticky for the vast majority of users than was originally projected.

On social web sites I started using several years ago, most of the people that caught my attention then stopped using the site a year or two later.

Social web sites also got mercilessly harvested for email addresses, instant messaging addresses, and the sites own internal messaging system. Yahoo 360 web site, any personals web site, Google Blogspot site are just a few examples of this.

Also, commercial businesses sprung up to capitalize on the huge amount of personal but not very private information on these web sites. Students behaving far more immaturely than grown adults came to haunt them in a way that it never had before.

Both the spammers and the shoulder surfers caused people to restrict who could look at their information or contact them. Or else drop out of the site entirely, canceling their membership.

There has also been some criminal exploitation and violence associated with social web sites.

• Teens and adults have fecklessly invited the public to come to the home of their parents or other people and basically destroy it.
• A teenager pretended to be his parents, posted a help wanted ad for a sitter on a social web site, and killed her when she showed up at his home.
• A small but steady number of young women were killed from coast to coast in the US by dates with deadly guys who contacted them on a certain well known social web site.

Finally, social web sites, which were very trendy in 2004-2006 are somewhat dying off. In fact, what might have been a trend back then, in retrospect, may have just been a fad.

For example, Yahoo announced this year that they are shutting down their Yahoo Personals and Yahoo 360 web sites this year.

The personals web site will not be replaced. It will likely not be missed. The service was overpriced and it was quickly overrun with spammers/scammers.

The Yahoo 360 social hub website users will be transferred over to a new Yahoo blogging hub site that has just been introduced. The 360 web site has lots of features that the new one does not. The new site is really a different animal.

The thing that endured from the social web site phenomenon were some features. They were associating things with items in the database on the site. The things users liked to do were: tagging with keywords, ranking items, adding comments, communicating with others who used or commented on something they shared an interest in.

So, while a fair number of technologies and trends on the web have panned out and gotten widely adopted, some trends led to things that never quite succeeded and were just fads.

One needs to keep an open mind but maintain some skepticism as well.