Great video from Dave Farley. I’ve had about half the length of his career, and maybe a fraction of his experience (he’s actually the person who taught many of the folks I tend to learn from). But it’s funny how much our thinking aligns. I share basically all of his "regrets". Well, I taught myself Erlang and OTP, then Scala and Akka and so on, so I don’t have that specific regret… The actor concurrency model is indeed brilliant. On the other hand, I do regret my formal "monads are monoids in the category of endofunctors" phase almost as much as I regret my "let’s refactor everything to use the Visitor pattern" phase. Even though, in hindsight, I can see how going through this kind of annoying phase is part of learning properly. But the one thing he mentioned that I really think about often is how we were all a little naive and believed in "temporary compromises for the greater good". Like many other tech people, I let the Agile movement be hijacked, thinking it was just going through an "adaptation phase"… It wasn’t. The Internet is the big one. And this isn’t just because of my involvement with Nostr, ActivityPub, and the broader idea of decentralised social media, that’s a consequence, not the cause. I honestly feel I was very naive, a bit lazy, and a huge believer in "economies of scale" and the “Privacy? I have nothing to hide” mindset. I bought into "let them make money and give me convenience". It felt like the proper way foward. I let forums, personal blogs, RSS, etc., die one by one. I encouraged people to join Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc while forums, IRC, and XMPP were still alive and thriving. I was the best kind of consumer, the kind who saw himself as "part of a movement". Just like Dave, I’m a distributed systems geek. And in my case specifically, I did my fair share of pushing everything to the cloud. I truly believed in the economy of scale. And the time-to-production plus early low cost for greenfield "cloud native" software supported that argument (well… until the software had a proper user base, and suddenly it didn’t). Overall, my biggest "regret" is not fully grasping sooner that what makes the internet great is and always was the great human beings behind it all. The creators and enthusiasts. The builders! My premise that "easier", "bigger", and "cheaper" ("free" if possible) would mean more of what I love about the internet… was wrong. Well, not entirely wrong, but it certainly killed a lot of what made it so great. The whole "economy of scale" thing came with trade-offs I was blissfully unaware of, or too quick to dismiss as "fear from people who just don’t get it". Maybe that explains my ambivalence about GenAI…Or more precisely, about how the "GenAI revolution" is happening while so many dismiss its downsides. I’m no longer willing to accept "temporary compromises for the greater good". Hopefully, I’ve grown more aware of trade-offs (well, maybe not entirely). But the stereotype of the overly excited youngster growing into a more careful adult definitely applies to me. #TechRegrets #SoftwareEngineering #Agile #DistributedSystems #InternetHistory #Decentralisation #BigTech #GenAI #DigitalEthics #TechCulture

GN Nostr! #memestr #GenAI #Cursor #ComputerScience #Education #Idiocracy2025