It was the end of 2013 and life had me on the move. Changing states and jobs forced a break from coding. It was during this break that I had time to investigate something I had noticed picking up steam for awhile- the web wasn't the "it" thing anymore. "Smart" phones were finally picking up steam and their app stores were exploding. Suddenly there was an alternative to the idea of developing for the web (with all of its tooling shortcomings) and the new rage was "native app development". Web apps were said to be slower, less responsive, less secure and lacked access to hardware and OS-level goodies that native development could provide. Time had reversed and now software development for networked apps had returned to the idea of packaged programs except the platform wasn't Windows or Macintosh but Android and iOS.
Just like that, the multi-billion dollar behemoths began devoting the majority of their resources to "mobile development"; IDE's, SDK's, new compiled languages, new build tools, app stores, mobile versions of desktop apps, web sites and web apps, seemingly endless screen variations for otherwise indistinguishable phone hardware, etc. Observing it all it seemed as if every other week there was a new "break out" app on an app store that went viral and raked in obscene amounts of money.
In all this money-drenched haze the internet and mobile industry was quickly ramping up into a peak "stupid investments and valuations" era. Crowdfunding platforms were home to endless vaporware that racked up gobs of money. Technology walled gardens were sprouting all over forcing users to make obnoxious purchase, use and app migration decisions. Apps that did nothing, produced nothing and had no discernible plan to generate revenue were valued in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, as with my initial survey of the web in 2011, I was disappointed and annoyed. But a lesson I internalized from reading many different tech biographies was that it was never a good idea to write off a trend without further research, no matter how frivolous and inane it seemed. So I jumped in head first.
Next.