Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

I watched news reports of the moon landing in 1969 as a kid. I played with tech throughout my youth ... converting a small, unused closet next to our garage as an electronics lab. I started with breadboarding (and occasionally, wirewrapping) 555 oscillators, and 741 op amps into weird circuits I'd read about.

About 50+ years later, I still build my own machines, albeit at the subsystem level versus the power supply and chip level. I am looking forward to working on automating image capture/processing for a telescope I bought last year.

I don't have a flying car (thank a deity), but I have an 8 inch telescope with automatic location and calibration. And a helluva lotta processing power, storage, and networking to do things with the images. I'm not saying I will run a 10/40 GbE optical fibre out to the deck where the telescope will sit ... but I'm not saying I won't. And yes, its nice to have 40GbE networking in my house (basement).

I've always viewed tech as a means to an end. I'm a scientist by training, a technologist and software person by choice. I've been an entrepreneur and many other things in my life. I see the tech as a way to do science more quickly, more accurately, and I really enjoy that it is an enabling function.

I got my start in HPC and supercomputing precisely because my simulations were taking too long on the workstations of the late 80s and early 90s. I stayed in HPC to build better/faster/stronger supers, and take advantage of the technological waves. Simulations that used to take a powerful (for the early 90s) supercomputer several hours, now take about a minute, on my laptop. Which has more processors, memory, and storage than the old super.

I think of technology as a wavefront that enables one to do more, better, and faster in its wake. Some people love the building of the tech, and designing new tech. Some like the applications. If you are bored with the building of tech, think of the applications that you could try, to help improve something real.

Since you mentioned Star Trek, I've been a lifelong enthusiast of Trek. The new stuff (junk) notwithstanding, I'm totally over Star Trek. I've seen every episode who knows how many times. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.

Tech is no different, or at least specialized facets of tech are no different.

This is exactly why I have recently pivoted from web development to working on a hardware project and using C++. It provides that same excitement I had back when I was first learning to code. Though right now it's just my own thing, I'm solving a tangible problem and get to learn things like writing native code, designing circuit boards, working with a microcontroller, using OpenSCAD, and so forth. Even if it goes no further than a toy prototype, it's been a lot of (albeit expensive) fun. Just the moment of receiving a shipment of PCBs that I designed, that were now manufactured at a factory, that actually worked upon assembly, was an exquisite feeling.

Tech is many things. I think if anyone is bored and there's nothing like family obligations holding them back, they should consider branching out into something else that might satisfy that itch. If you've just stuck to things like JavaScript and Ruby, don't think that you can't do something like program microcontrollers with C++.

On the other hand, I really do think that the concept of "web scale" has made the field far less fun. We all love to scoff at buzzwords, yet we are the greatest purveyors of buzzwords and cargo-culting technology.

Kubernetes or GTFO. Rust or GTFO. Who uses Wepback anymore, bruh? I think my grandpa used AngularJS. Aren't SPAs a thing from like 2006? There's no way a Rails app can scale, bruh. Do you even BDD, bruh? Who seriously doesn't use Typescript nowadays? Every successful startup uses blockchain now with AI. Microservices are pointless without microfrontends. You mean you're not even using LiveView?

/s

It's like we no longer believe that you can just write something however you want and then do the work to scale them up if the time ever comes. Everything needs to be shiny new cool-tech out of the gate and compete with as much traffic as The Google.

Yeah, it was always kind of that way, but I think it's a lot worse than when I first got into the field.

Oh, and there's also the possibility that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get startups off the ground without already having revenue to start with. What happened to the garage-startup? You don't really hear about those anymore. Granted, I've yet to start a startup, but my impression is that nowadays investors are playing the game so safe that Jobs and Woz might have never achieved velocity.

We need to get over ourselves a bit, which is why I think it would actually be a good thing if the tech world could see another correction. We haven't had a meaningful correction since the dotcom bubble.

The drought is going to to be over when a new fundamental shift in platform occurs which will kick off a new generation of startups, frameworks, applications, wonders and terrors.

Personally, I like where tech is headed. Hope I can be on the frontier of some of these new tech.