Burning Man '09
February 1, 2010 is here. The stock market is better. New projects are in swing. What are you working on these days? Are you fine tuning your existing application and adding new features? Is your day spent building something new? Are you using a new hardware platform? Have you entered a new arena?

Looking forward, the things that I find interesting are ideas like Kiva, which lets you make micro investments with entrepreneurs in emerging countries. I love how GPS and Web2.0 are changing our lives. No more paper maps! I still have to think twice when I hop in the car and ask myself if I have a local map. Then, I remember I have Google Maps. How cool is that? I love Street View on Google Maps. I love flying through a virtual canyon in Google Earth.

The face of media will never be the same. Thank goodness. How long will it take us to get over the insult to our trust and intelligence that old time media was? All the lies and hype. Now, we have blogs, podcasts, comments, forums, streaming media, text messages, social networks, Wikipedia, instant access to information so we can make sense of things right away.

Those are some ideas that excite me. What excites you? It may very well be working on an existing app and being excited about something that's not work related. My friend Graham loves GPS enabling his dog and mapping dog walks through the snow. In fact, I just bought a Bow-Lingual, and I don't even own a dog! That's fine. You may work to live or live to work. What I am curious about, and I think the community will be interested in hearing is what you're doing that involves technology that you think is exciting. Even what you think would be exciting.

I love great enterprises. Here's an example. I love a business called The Parking Spot. What's the big deal? It's so well run I look forward to using their parking service. I pat myself on the back for being so clever. I use their service and my life is easier. I pull in, take a ticket and park. Minutes later, I get picked up by a comfortable bus that takes me to the airport without any drama. When I get back from a trip, I walk out to a quiet parking space at the airport and minutes later, a bus takes me right back to my car. They give me a bottle of water as I leave and they have a customer loyalty program. What's the big deal? Nothing, really. It's just a parking lot. But, they do it right. It's so easy to do a bad job. But, look at how happy it makes me to enjoy good service.

You don't have to invent the next big thing. You can just build a better mousetrap. But, whatever you're doing or dreaming, would you please take a minute to let us know here with a comment? Some people like specifics, but don't feel constrained to answer these questions:

1) what are you working on or dreaming of?
2) what's language/platform/industry?
3) what's the business model (product sales, service, support, advertising, marketing, etc)?
4) what are the threats and opportunities?

Thanks for your input - and, stay tuned!

Views: 117

Comment

You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!

Join Codetown

Comment by Eric kovar on February 1, 2010 at 9:04pm
The Parking Spot is a brilliant real estate play. They needed very little expensive road frontage, but acquired huge amounts of inexpensive land for parking for pennies on the dollar.

Happy 10th year, JCertif!

Notes

Welcome to Codetown!

Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.

When you create a profile for yourself you get a personal page automatically. That's where you can be creative and do your own thing. People who want to get to know you will click on your name or picture and…
Continue

Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.

Looking for Jobs or Staff?

Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

 

Enjoy the site? Support Codetown with your donation.



InfoQ Reading List

Revenium Unveils Tool Registry to Expose the True Cost of AI Agents

Revenium has announced the general availability of its Tool Registry, a new capability designed to give enterprises a complete, end-to-end view of what their AI agents actually cost.

By Craig Risi

AI Coding Assistants Haven’t Sped up Delivery Because Coding Was Never the Bottleneck

Agoda recently published an observation arguing that while AI coding tools have measurably raised individual developer output, the resulting velocity gains at the project level have been surprisingly modest, because coding was never the real bottleneck. The post claims that the bottleneck has shifted upstream to specification and verification because these areas require human judgment.

By Eran Stiller

QCon London 2026: Ethical AI Is an Engineering Problem

At QCon London 2026, Clara Higuera, Responsible AI Program Lead at BBVA, presented how many of the risks associated with AI systems are fundamentally engineering challenges rather than purely governance or policy issues.

By Daniel Dominguez

Presentation: From Friction to Flow: How Great DevEx Makes Everything Awesome

Nicole Forsgren discusses the "AI Productivity Paradox", explaining why generating code faster often makes deployment bottlenecks more expensive. She shares the DevEx framework to help architects and leaders systematically remove friction. Learn how to use DORA metrics and RICE prioritization to make a data-driven case for platform health.

By Nicole Forsgren

Article: Lessons from Adopting SwiftUI in an App with 50 Million Users

Most SwiftUI educational content focuses on small projects and sample apps that do not explain what it means to adopt it in a 50 million user app developed by a team of 20+ iOS engineers. This article will attempt to fill this gap. and show how to succeed without breaking your team, your app, or your users' trust along the way.

By Jimit Patel

© 2026   Created by Michael Levin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service