I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing lately — trying to find parallels between what’s happening in the world today and what I’ve lived through. As they say, those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.
And recently, with all the hype around AI, I’m reminded of feelings I felt early on in my career as a Web Developer. But, let’s start at the beginning. I knew I wanted to work on websites way before I took a class on them. I taught myself how to do basic HTML / CSS and even started making websites for local bands in high school as a very minor side hustle.
When I took CS 201 (building your own compiler – often a make or break for CS majors vs folks who would instead take it as a minor), our professor joked about how this class was likely irrelevant for many of us. I knew that was true for me so, once I had the opportunity to take electives, I packed in as many courses as I possibly could to learn the ins-and-outs of web development. In doing so I picked up Javascript, Perl, Shell Scripting and really started to understand how the underpinnings of that customer experience was served from a technical perspective.
Before YouTube shorts and Instagram reels had a stranglehold on attention on the internet, there were websites we’d go to that would feature animated comedy shorts (think Homestar Runner). Most of these were built using a scripting language called “ActionScript” and you had to use a tool called Flash by a company called MacroMedia. And I remember feeling woefully inadequate that I hadn’t mastered “Flash” as we’d refer to it as developers. I had initially worried that the entire internet would turn into these experiences and I just couldn’t cut it.
I remember these feelings because it was one of those things that I was just never going to be good at, no matter how much work I put in. I knew that then. And then I made a conscious decision to trust the process: there were people who could do this work and they were specialists, it’s OK that I’m not and there’s a place for me, too. I admired the work of many a talented Flash developer and I built the more boring experiences around their flashier pursuits (for lack of a better adjective), which did indeed provide a way to make a living at the time.
I had a few of these experiences at college that prepared me for this reality: not everything is going to be suited for you, you are not everyone’s cup of tea, and somehow, you’ll persevere. I think that might be the real point of college — not so much what you study but the fact that you actually had the resilience to stick to something for a few years and see it through, even when the going gets tough. Good preparation for life in that way (not so much in the setting your own schedule part and rarely having classes on Friday).
But back to those nagging feelings. I dabbled from time to time but more or less gave up on needing to be proficient in Flash — and it’s a good thing because that would’ve been a waste of time. I remember first hearing the whispers about SEO challenges with sites that were built entirely on Flash. And then, when the iPhone came out and effectively didn’t support this, that was a nail in a coffin we didn’t see at the time. Over time as more internet browsing traffic shifted from desktop to mobile, that became a much bigger segment you couldn’t ignore and Flash officially died in 2020.
Why is this relevant now?
The technology that we refer to as “AI” today is evolving quickly. So quickly in fact that it’s unclear if what folks might be learning to do today is actually going to serve them in the long run (will “prompt engineering” be a thing we still talk about in 10 years?). But I do think there’s an element of life imitating art here that will create some degree of stickiness around the concept of prompting an assistant. We all crave a “Jarvis” assistant like Tony Stark has in Iron Man (or “Computer” as they say in Star Trek) that is reasonably competent at performing quick tasks and analyses that would take a human much longer to complete and could be error prone. And my sincere hope is that we will get there so that we are harnessing this technology to help a doctor have a more productive conversation with a patient or other useful ways real people should benefit from this innovation.