torsdag 29 augusti 2013

The magic of today


I really love devloping software. What I find most amazing is when you take time of and step back and think about what it is your doing. These are not new thoughts about technology, but I think it is important not to forget how empowering our current situation is.

I have helped my girlfriend get ahead of her collegues in the race to sign up to vacant work shifts. I built this web service that crawls her work website, using her credentials, to look for new shifts posted online. The web service is equal to her logging in to the website, navigating to the correct page and looking if a new interesting entry is made.

Here is the freaky part. I am writing a bunch of words in a document (the code) on a computer in Sweden. I send the code to a server in USA which will tell a computer to control a swedish server. The swedish server will return information to USA that will sort it and store it in a database.

To automate the process further I have written script on my Raspberry Pi in my living room in Sweden. It regulary contacts the server in USA and asks for the latest results. If the results are interesting it will go back to USA and contact Google and ask them to send a mail to my girlfriend which will read the email on her smartphone in Sweden.

Imagine this process without the Internet we know of today. This whole process takes a couple of seconds. This was unbelievable a couple of decades ago. This was unthought of a couple of hundred years ago. It is godlike compared to a couple of thousend years ago. Everybody today weilds power greater than any man or creature before us on this earth, It is important to not take it for granted.

It is easy to forget that the technologies we have today wasn't around a couple of years ago.It makes
us historyless and makes us forget why we have this advantage that we have today. To continue to advance we have to continue to use technology to better ourselves which will benefit everyone around us.

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