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title: Navigating a Series of Tubes
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### Navigating a Series of Tubes

###### Mike Ebert

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### Personal web development journey began in 1992
- Dad was a software developer
- Had a computer, let me play Castles II, and challenged me to learn Pascal
- All types of schooling, including home school
- Took AP Computer Science on my own

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### BYU: 1999--2006
- Computer Science with a business minor
    - Friend introduced me to web pages and _all_ the builds of Firefox
    - Building web pages with tables and spacer gifs

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### BYU: 1999--2006
- Served a mission in Russia 2001-2003
- Changed majors because of conflict between school and being engaged
- Business major (marketing emphasis)
    - But took a CSS class and an Internet marketing course

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### Sebo Marketing
- Internship doing marketing
- Found out I knew stuff about websites
    - CSS 2 and the div revolution
    - Internet Explorer 6 compatibility issues

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### Sebo Marketing
- Graduated in 2006
- Led website and then technical services team
	- Custom CMS in .Net, PHP
	- Hand-written JavaScript functions
	- Fonts
	- WordPress 2.3

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### Alliance Web Marketing
- Tried to run a marketing agency, but really did mostly web development
	- WordPress (various versions)
	- jQuery
	- Responsive Web Design (RWD)

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### Perfect Search/IMAT Solutions
- Web development, then Angular web development for a medical search and records product
	- JavaScript, baby!
	- Angular

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### WhiteCanyon
- Website rebuild with huge results
- Static site generation, headless

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### DVO
- Working on a useful app for a company with very stable demand
- React

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### Luhnar
- Co-founder
- CDN
- Got crushed by COVID

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### Indicio
- Verifiable credentials and self-sovereign identity
- Team lead, bring all my talents to bear

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One thing I'm proud of is having the opportunity to mentor and help launch careers

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### Where we're going
- Consolidating of CMS and store options
- WYSIWYGs that don't generate garbage
- Voice interaction

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### Where we're going
- Serverless
- SSR
- Edge delivery

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### Where we're going
- Security and privacy
- Block chain
- Web 1, 2, 3, 5...

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### Where we're going
- Big data sets
- AI-generated code
- Quantum computing

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### What to expect as a web developer

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### Change will be constant
- Get asked to do stuff that is only tangential to what you're actually "supposed" to do...
- Interact across disciplines, teams, companies, time zones, nations, languages...
- Your title may not be that applicable or that big a deal

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### Keys to the Process
Remote work is entirely possible but has its own challenges

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What do you call a group of programmers?
A merge conflict

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### Keys to the Process
The process and the communication is as important as the code

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### Keys to the Process
Estimating is hard

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### Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect,
even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

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### Industry Growth and Leadership
- Demand is high for technically capable people
- Management is an option, leadership is a must
- Morality is your gift to the world as you shape the future of humanity

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## Recommendations

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### Always be learning
- Get your fundamentals down
- Find sources that will help you stay up to date
- Save some time for side projects
- Have a focus or emphasis in addition to programming

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### Live in the real world
- Get a great chair and don't sit in it all the time
- Exercise, have adventures offline
- Don't let web development get in the way of what's truly important

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### Push hard to grow
- Step up for new responsibility
- Try new things, do what scares you
- Don't get stuck in a bad situation

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Your purpose may not be visible until it's in hindsight

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### Thank You!
michael.k.ebert@gmail.com