The History of the Dot Com Era
Ah yeah dude. I&#x27;m having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings.<p>Here&#x27;s another thought: We&#x27;ve never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physical servers or prepaying for bandwidth. If you dream of it, you can make it. There are literally children playing with neural network APIs in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. They&#x27;re going to produce some amazing software.<p>Me - I&#x27;m a bit of a 90s dot-com casualty, secure in a career but lost the <i>move fast and break things</i> mentality awhile ago. I make sure to keep myself up to date. Part of it&#x27;s just keeping your mind alive to new ideas.<p>There is no - I repeat <i>no</i> wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing. The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; that doesn&#x27;t mean it isn&#x27;t the font of creativity. We get old but the things we build survive in new forms.