Category: Articles (Page 152 of 258)

TL;DR: I’m what you’d call a social networking skeptic and I have little trust in the services we use to house our data.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post like this for sometime. It’s not controversial and it won’t result in a lot of discussion, but it’s something important to me and it took a while to articulate everything it is that I wanted to say.

Originally, it started off as something like this:

When it comes to working with data and applications, it’s important I have the ability to own my data.

But that isn’t completely true, so hear me out.

I know some people believe that open source gives them the ability to own all of the information that they give to the application, but that’s not always the case.

First, I think using nothing but open source as a personal philosophy is great. It’s not something that I personally choose to do, but I absolutely understand it and it does have a certain allure to it.

Secondly, when working with open source software, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the information that you’re giving an application will continue to be own solely by you. Take, for example, Instagram.

It’s a closed source application that uses third-party libraries several of which are open source:

“We thank the open source community for all of their contributions.”

And that’s also fine. Using other libraries rather than writing your own – under the right circumstances – is one mark of good software development.

But do they let you maintain the ownership of your images and videos? This isn’t meant to call out Instagram specifically, but any of the social sharing services that are currently available (especially those that are popular).

To be clear, applications like Instagram do let you maintain a copy of your image on your Camera Roll (or whatever equivalent application your phone or device calls it), but that image is now stored on a third-party server where it may or may not persist from the moment it’s shared and whether or not you delete your account.

And sure, the terms to which you agree – whether you’ve read them or not – are subject to change at any time such that perhaps the rights you have today are not the rights you have tomorrow.

Again, for what it’s worth, I use Instagram as an example not because I’m out to vilify them, but because they were the first example that came to mind.

Anyway, the more I began to think about data ownership as it relates to social applications, the cloud, and basically any other application, the more I began to realize that my problem isn’t that I want to own all of my data – I mean, of course I want to own all of my data – but that I’m skeptical as to what some services may do with the data that I give them.

In this case, I’m specifically talking about social networking services.

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One of the challenges that we – as programmers – are constantly faced with is learning a new programming language or whatever the latest and greatest technologies that are available (and using the term ‘greatest’ is just for the sake of the cliché phrase).

Then again, a lot of us get into this field for that exact reason, don’t we? I mean, we enjoy learning new technologies, applying them within the context of programming and problem solving, and then doing it again.

But after even just a few years in the business, it can get a little exhausting. This doesn’t mean it’s any less rewarding, but it does mean that when something else comes along – especially from the likes of larger players like Facebook, Twitter, or a similar company – other people are going to want to use them in their projects because the other company uses them and then we’re tasked with learning them.

For what it’s worth, I don’t consider it a bad thing, but it does contribute to the amount of time that goes into a project. This particular idea is something that’s better suited for a business-related post so I digress, for now.

But there’s another side to this:

A segment of the programming culture claims that we should be keeping our skills sharp by learning something new each year or so in order to make sure that we’re still relevant, to make sure that we’re still able to keep up with those coming up behind us, and generally able to keep up with the direction the web and/or software is headed.

And I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but if you’re in a position where you’re raising a family, or you’re in a position where you’re a little bit older and have obligations and responsibilities outside of your work such that you can’t spend as much time at a computer as you used to do (and I know that feel!), then this comes off as a very intimidating and frustrating demand on our time.

So why do we do it to ourselves?

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