The future needs you

Sometimes the future just doesn't happen! It needs people like you to make the difference.

Re-enforcing the concept that what matters is not ideas but energy and focus in execution, there are a number of ideas that although brilliant, we still need the right individuals at the right place in order for them to become a reality.

This happens in all fields (for example there is a great interview by Elon Musk where he talks about how the concorde and moon landings are good examples of us going backwards in technological capabilities).

On the developing/coding world, in addition to the WallbyJS (real-time unit test execution and code-coverage visualisation) that I cannot understand why all IDEs do not replicate and deeply integrate those capabilities in their engines, another amazing example is the Zoetrope (Interacting with the Ephemeral Web) research by Adobe.

This research was published in this YouTube video, and it shows a working real-time time machine for web pages (and other content).

This research transformed the Ephemeral and 'no-past' nature of web pages, into a multi-dimensional graph, where the previous versions of a page's content can be visualised, transformed and analysed in all sorts of ways (check out the video and you will be blown away).

Given how powerful this idea is, the interesting question is "Why hasn't it evolved!".

My view is that because there is a significant amount of research and technology required to reach the workflow shown in that video, and the fact that the technology and ideas where not released under an Open Source license (or Creative Commons), any new attempts would have to start from scratch (since it clearly looks like Adobe did not continued the research projects)

Also important is that an individual's vision and an sustainable economic model matter (i.e. someone who understand the problem and someone who is funding the research). Although the key concepts are clearly shown in the video and easy to understand, in the last 10 years we had not had an individual (or team) with the right energy and drive that has decided to replicate this research into an Open Source environment, and built a strong community around it.

I'm very frustrated by this lack of development, since there are tons of areas in Application Security where this kind of anti-ephemeral technology would be massively important.

Gen Z dev, if you are looking for a place to start replicating this idea, here is one for you:

Create a tool/website to search and visualise the git files history (for example how to do a search across previous versions of files)

That is not a problem that has been solved today, and not only you would let a lot about how git works, you would be creating a tool very useful to you and the development community. As an example that would allow for the easily discovery of secrets stored in git repos that have been 'deleted' using commits (which means that the secrets still exist in that repo and are available to anybody that can clone it)

Pick a vision and be the one that makes the difference

Part of your path as a Gen Z developer, is to find something that you are really passionate for which you can execute. The win-win scenario is when you pick an idea that either is quite new (like chaos engineering) or has been around for a while but the momentum has been lost. For example the Zoetrope mentioned here, or SAST technology (Static analysis of software/applications/infrastructure for finding security issues)