That Tingly, Geeky Feeling

My day job is building Web applications you will never see. That is by design; my apps deal with SECRET STUFF.

The first aside about failure: My first Internet application is also one you will also never see, not because of secrecy, but because it failed. We made an immersive app with a rich graphical interface that allowed people to share photos and messages with a select group of friends. The core app acted as an operating system, able to discover compatible services to provide data. It flopped. A few years later MySpace and Facebook provided crappy platforms that allowed the world to shout at each other. In retrospect my biggest mistake (among many) was assuming people valued privacy.

ANYWAY, I build Web applications. But I come from a background of developing desktop apps, and let me tell you, even now the world of Web app development is ridiculously painful. Slowly, slowly, software design principles worked out decades ago are finding their way to the Web.

Another aside about a failure: A while back I created a framework that allowed the UI (still running in a dang browser after all this time) to connect to the server with such efficiency that when anyone anywhere made a change, everyone saw it immediately. In geek terms, I created an MVC system where the central model was shared by all clients in real time. It also allowed anyone to track the entire history of every value in the system. I had a great 3D interface for that I never got to implement. The system worked so well I still get misty thinking about it. It was (still is) marketable. That project was shit-canned for reasons I could have managed better that had nothing to do with the technology.

But goddammit, I’ll fail shooting for making something great over succeeding at the mediocre, and I’ve got the track record to prove it.

I may have that chance again. I can’t be too specific (sorry for the tease), but I’m pretty excited. So this afternoon I snuck out of work early to go and… work. But fun work. Perhaps a chance to take my failures and put them together into a game-changer. I’ve come close before.

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