44 minutes ago
Throwing yourself at something that's never been done is fun.
But know what's really fun? Taking something that's been done before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.
9 minutes ago
Any examples?
an hour ago
I started building something pretty obscure about 14 years ago; https://socketcluster.io/ an open source, WebSocket-based RPC + pub/sub library with a focus on in-order async stream-processing with backpressure monitoring.
It didn't start out like that. Initially, it was just another WebSocket library with a focus on making it easier to scale to multiple processes.
It's kind of mind-bending to me though that it still feels like it's "too early." You'd think that the ability to efficiently process RPCs and pub/sub messages from clients whilst maintaining ordering would be critical... Yet if you look around the industry; callback-based event handlers are still the norm for most application logic and people are still not using queues where they should be. People think of queues as some expensive/bulky system with overhead which requires additional architecture (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, STOMP, NSQ) and always requires exactly-once delivery, they have not tried to make the idea a core part of their application logic. Software today is FULL of race conditions because of this blind-spot. Yet I still cannot communicate my message. It's too difficult to explain the benefits.
an hour ago
Is not about doing something never been done before. Feels more like doing something that can be sold, because else there could be legal problems, competition, captive markets and so on. That is about the current state of the world, not yourself.
You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.
And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold, you still grow through the process. You are not ensured commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe that is not always a bad thing.
an hour ago
What do you mean by "is not about...?" The article is precisely about that. If you don't like what the article is about, go write your own? Weird take, buddy.
44 minutes ago
I think gmuslera is right to point out that being the first doesn't really matter (for most people). You also need support from the right kinds of people and it's not a given that being first and eventually being 'proven right' (which is itself highly subjective and contested) translates to the right kinds of people automatically gravitating to your idea and helping you to make a living out of it. There are many great innovations which stayed in the shadows long after the death of their creators. Many were never given due credit.
Humans fundamentally haven't changed since the time of Galileo or Socrates. Being too early tends to be a bad thing.
It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.