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Phone calls used to be so expensive while I was growing up and the cost increased exponentially as the distances increased. Often I had to plan what to talk to people when making a call to keep it short; as my entire pocket money for the month can be used up if I spoke to my parents for 30 minutes during peak hours. Communication was expensive so that people planned carefully on how to talk, when to talk and how much to talk. Some people even chose to be contactable only in person and mails by avoiding a telephone line to save big on telephone costs.

What happens when something that was expensive becomes cheap, do we spend that savings elsewhere? This is where Jevons Paradox occurs. When communication became cheaper we stared overdoing it. What used to be a routine 3 minute call to a friend once in a while is now well over 30 minutes. We started paying more by time spent rather than money spent. It is a systems problem, the inefficiency just moves to another place.

This is applicable for anything, food was expensive and refrigerating food was even more expensive so we had invented a lot of ways to carefully store, cook right amounts, recycle leftovers into new dishes and also find ways to preserve through fermentation, pickling etc. My grandmother almost never generated trash or food waste to be dumped, all the edible portions were eaten and organic waste like peels went to plants which again gave back food. We are talking about this cycle as a new way of simple life and as if no one did this before.

This is an important factor in web development in particular and software development overall. Developers are given a lot more freehand to use resources at will to deliver the experience for the user. This has resulted in loading a ~500 KB homepage of which most of the code that is downloaded and processed is not directly useful or seen by the user (A good portion would be to track what a user is doing!). In a constrained environment, elegant solutions appear; in an abundant environment everything is bloated and there is no judicious use. A single webpage can potentially crash a browser or slow down the entire system.

How can this be solved? In many other industries the problem of plenty is not there for users, there are always constraints to work with to get efficient and elegant solutions. We need something like ‘Muntzing‘ for software industry; instead of needlessly hammering through generic all in all bloated solutions we can cut out the fat and concentrate only on core work.

 

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You have a business which needs apps running on iOS and android; which one is easy, building native apps or hybrid ones?

If you are the one who right away answers either native or hybrid without asking what are the considerations for the apps then you are setup for failure or great hardship. There is no blanket right approach to build apps that look similar and works similarly across the ecosystems.

smartphones-2182838_640Building rich native apps require depth in understanding of the capabilities of the  platform and designing a common experience for the users even though the capabilities of the underlying system might be different. Two separate teams, two different development pace add to the complexity.

On the other hand, building hybrid apps require a great breadth in mobile development. This means the team should have developers who understand iOS and android systems, knowledge of javascript, some experience in trouble shooting applications in iOS and android (may even require java, kotlin or swift exposure for some native code). It is a tall ask, requires a fair deal of experience and knowledge for everyone in the team.

Choose wisely, a blanket approach of one over the other for everything we do is not right and often leads into difficulties. If you say ‘As a company we decided to only hybrid apps’ then you don’t either understand the complexities or have not given enough thought on how to implement.

 

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We are increasingly surrounded by things what we want to hear and see, which traps us into a small circle of our own echo chamber. Before internet targeting something for someone is quite hard, a person has to do a great deal of research to find something useful about a person. Now it is just a click away and we are giving it away in a few clicks.

We are in an era that our attention has been targeted like never before and with great precision. We are giving away a lot when we message someone, when we talk to someone, when we read news articles, when we like our friend’s photos, when we order food, when we buy something, when we watch a movie, when we use maps, when we use search engines; there is not a place where we can control what we can give unless we put in deliberate effort.

All this creates a profile of us and then feeds us what we have liked and used so far. I chose to listen to jazz music one day in an app, from that day onwards I keep getting jazz music prompts and I have to wrestle my way out to find something else. Music was obvious, news is not. If I had clicked on a type of news in Facebook then I would keep getting the same kind of it and subconsciously I will be primed to think that is the only thing happening around me. The same applies for anything I can think about, as a first step I unsubscribed to all the emails and thanks to GDPR it made my life even more easy to unsubscribe. I also uninstalled Facebook from my phone and use it as a way to find some old friends and get their contact through the browser.

The next steps I began to do was to go under the radar. It may be hard to go under the radar especially when we use social networks and messaging apps but we can control a lot of things what we do on the browser. I stumbled on a link that helps us to stay private in the era of mass surveillance, I started cutting down on ads & trackers; it is easy to do even if you are not a full time developer. Privacy is getting increasingly hard, if we don’t seek it we will get stuck in an echo chamber, listen and see only what we want to not what is happening around.