As the year is progressing rather rapidly towards its inevitable end, I feel now is an appropriate time before the end of year revelry begins to take a look what’s been going on. Needless to say this will be a delightfully personal view…
My life
I’ve had a somewhat varied lifestyle this year, as is the way of student life. Last Christmas seems not so long ago when the weather was crazy, and I was working back in my home town with a continuing and productive work arrangement at a software development company.
In the past year there have been house moves, weddings and graduations of friends and family, making for a hectic but enjoyable social time.
In addition to this I’ve had exams, worked over the summer and am well and truly stuck into my final year of university. I’m also starting out new ventures developing Android apps for mobile devices and promoting a major project I’m working on which I hope will have a successful commercial future.
It goes without saying that at times this year has been stressful. Its also been paradoxically both profitable and costly (in terms of money and time). Still on balance, its all good, as they say.
Politics
Looking at the wider view on the world this year: In the UK there’s been big political changes, namely in the form of a new government, a tighter budget and spending cuts. This has already and will continue to impact everyone in this country. The long term effects remain to be seen, and as I’m not an expert I can’t really talk in depth about it. As 2012 draws closer the London Olympics loom like a very lavish party someone agreed to throw when they had one too many. In the cold light of day one is left wondering whether an ostentatious display (which may or may not stimulate the economy) is more worthy of funding than the NHS or the education of future generations…
Technology
Smarter mobile devices have exploded onto the market in a big way recently, and there are more offerings in the form of tablet devices to come. This has opened up new possibilities for users and developers alike.
End-user centric apps are the name of the game on both mobile devices and the web in terms of buzz generated. While it brings many new opportunities, the increasing popularity of homebrew software start-ups tends to dilute the market due the average quality of such end-user software becoming diminished (such as on the Android Market). People are also still looking out for the next big thing in terms of social networking.
What worries me about rapid breeding of start-ups and focus on end-user software is whether it really boosts the economy or not. Advertising based revenue can be very profitable, but largely only for the real big shot hosts – Google and Facebook being prime examples. The middle men in terms of content providers and those placing their adverts with schemes like Adwords / Adsense, don’t necessarily get much of the benefit passed on to them. All this hype in areas such as these leaves me wondering whether there will in the near future be a lack of software developers who build software that actually does stuff. I’m talking about applications such as those that make business-to-business transactions possible and automate business processes.
And beyond
Well there’s a slice of stuff that’s been rattling around in my brain for a little while.
Next year for me is crunch time in terms of longer term employment in whatever form I may find it. With any luck soon life will be a bit more settled. All that remains to be said is that this time next year rodders… we’ll be millionaires!
