QHC

So, yes, the blockchain doesn’t make files smaller, but it could work to verify their authenticity, and that they have not been tampered with.

As with every other suggested use of blockchain, there are already better ways to verify contents. It’s called hashing, it’s been around for decades, and we do it all the time.

So instead of videos being hosted on 1 server, videos could be downloaded and made available by anyone to anyone at any time.

This is going to run into all kinds of bottlenecks. Individual users may have a fast enough Internet connection to stream HD video, but uploading is often much slower. Even if not, one user could only co-host maybe 1-2 other users. Also, ISPs sure aren’t going to like all the increased bandwidth!

People always vastly underestimate the bandwidth requirements for smooth, streaming video.

Another very happy 1Password user here!

I switched my workplace to 1Password and I moved from Dashlane at the same time. One thing that’s nice about 1P from that perspective is that our plan gives everyone a free personal account that they could take with them if they left the company (they’d have to pay for it themselves at that point of course).

Usability is the best of any password manager I’ve used, but the killer feature for us as a development team was the flexibility. Being able to assign the same credentials to multiple URLs (e.g. dev, stage, QA, prod) was just not possible with everything else we looked at the time.

I posted my full story elsewhere, but my origin as a coder also starts with a game before I realized that coding was more interesting. In my case it was C&C: Red Alert, which was the first video game I got for Christmas.

I have been working as a web developer, now a manager and less of a coder, for over 20 years.

Whenever I get the chance to tell this story, I always credit the game Command and Conquer: Red Alert for beginning my journey into coding and web development. This was long before auto matchmaking, so to play with other people you had to know their IP address in order to connect directly. To help with this, there was a chat app that came with the game called Westwood Online. While at first it was used for the intended purpose, I also met my first “Internet girlfriend” in those chat rooms, back when such a thing was confusing and scandalous to my parents. Eventually I joined a Star Wars RPG “guild”, and of course we needed a way to document to other guilds how amazing our imaginary spaceship collection was, so I volunteered to make a website. I wish I still had it, but just imagine a Geocites website with clunky frames and lots of pictures of different Star Destroyers or X-Wings.

After that I was absolutely hooked. Video games moved to the background and most of my solo free time was spent on various coding projects. I was fortunate enough to be in the first wave of “webmasters”, starting with free hosting platforms like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. Anyone else remember web rings?? I don’t remember now how I found it, but my first “real” coding experience was after joining a forum called NeoPages. I had to write an application and be interviewed first, but eventually was given FTP access to my very own website, no ads or limitations! That’s really when my journey as a developer began. (I ended up being one of the primary administrators when I got older and the owner didn’t have time, now in retrospect I can see how that was a very important learning experience.)

I started working at a local web design company in high school and continued working there part-time during the semester and full-time in the summers throughout college. I almost burned out from that due to an insanely manipulative and verbally abusive boss, but lucked into an even better job when I had a lunch with the former co-partner to the bad boss. I was really just looking for some advice as I got ready to graduate but I left that lunch with a job offer!

Fast forward to the 2008 financial crisis and the small business he was running, of which I was employee #3 for after his sister, ends up falling apart. Most of our business came from a marketing agency that was literally down the street, so they snatched up me and another developer to maintain the dozen sites we had built for them in the last few years. That place was chaotic at first, but the leadership at the top was smart enough to invest in digital before many of our competitors, letting things grow and then knowing when to pull back and focus on the business side of the process, too. (Fun story, the very first meeting I was part of after moving to the agency, still on contract and not a FTE yet, the owner of the whole agency comes in and tells us the last project was 300% over budget. I can’t even imagine that happening now, at worst we would have realized something was wrong by the time we ended the first sprint!)

I’ve now been at that agency for 14 years as of last week! I never thought I would stay in one place or enjoy being a manager, but I’ve come to love the mentoring side of my job more than the technical side. Now that I am nearing my 40s, it’s also nice to have a stable employer in a region that does not have many similar opportunities–most of our clients are out of state, so before the rise of remote working I would have had to moved away from my entire family to find an equivalent job (both in terms of the kind and quality of work we do and financially). I’m still learning new things all of the time, too, even if I am not necessarily the one writing code myself.