Conquer the world

I was asked by the organizers of SzegedTech meetup to take a presentation about ... something. I'm always in trouble those times - I'm not the kind of presenter who can explain a topic from A to Z. But there was something. I wanted to present how great I feel about being a developer. Thinking a bit about it - as it's a bit selfish - I changed the topic to: What can a developer do? For those who missed the presentation let me summarize the talk.


I think most of you - just like me - want to help the world. When I was a kid I wanted superpowers like ruling the time or being invisible. So I can get all the chocolates of the universe. Now you see you don't have to rule the world and still can change it radically. The topic was about access to the world. You may call it conquering, if you like.

The story starts with us, developers. People who knows technology and use it. People who think and would like to change something. Developing is an amazing word and I don't think I'm too keen to restrict its definition on coders. But definitely relating to technology.

Developers are connected to their machines all the time. They are essentially ruling a massive part of the information available now and here. They are on the internet or other networks, they use devices and they collaborate. Let me emphasize three words: internet, productivity and devices.

Internet is the brain of everything today. Like a child developing its brain but only exponentially more effective and limitless. Productivity boosts everything that can happen today. Not just human but technological productivity, where folding higher and higher layers of abstractions allows information exchange to grow almost exponentially. And then devices. The ultimate tools of accessibility. I think state of the art phones are super far from being accessible. And yet they managed to change our lives big time. (I'm running a little experiment to answer emails during sleep. See if my unconscious mind is better than me.) So add up these three think about ruling the world. Do you start getting now how much power you have?

What I like in technology is how we control it. I think it's no question that in technology and innovation the other must have component is community. I don't understand closed source industries. Really. If you ask me the biggest game changers I name StackOverflow, YCombinator, open source, GitHub, LinkedIN, Twitter, and many alike. Technology requires high level control. Without that it remains simple - or extinct. If you think about numbers and statistics it's the same. Closed systems with few components cannot grow over a certain level of complexity.

So if we have tech and we're in the system how we can conquer it? We reach the target much faster. Our change will be accessible to a much larger audience. It's gonna be a better experience each year. Some examples: your mobile app can be used by billions potentially. Even more if it's a website. Imagine you make things accessible to people, like governmental administration, voting, collaboration, paying bills, reporting crime, calling ambulance - or even better, somebody's pacemaker calling it. See the arab sprint, the revolution in Egypt. Tell me one thing that cannot be improved by technology. I challenge you.

I think we're still in a very early age in technology. Why? There are still people not using it. Also it's pretty unpredictable, acting like a whiny child sometimes. And finally it's forming every day. However this latter cannot be stopped the other two is very important milestones to solve.

After all this I have to two important skill in my mind that everybody should master. First one is to be able to collaborate and contribute. It's a general rule in product business to never produce to stock. Stock is loss. Same with information. You keep it you kill it.
Second skill is to recognize design patterns. As a programmer I frequently work with design patters. But in technology - in general - it's more and more important. It's like what history for life.

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So the question - do you see how important you are? Do you see how much you can change?

Well, it's still not the whole picture, I was talking about Barbie and Batman and secrets and future as well. Here you are the presentation, it's more of a symbolic one:

Most of the ideas can be found on my mindmap:

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Peter