Hello there! I'm a person of many names, and many faces, but professionally I usually go by Taylor. I grew up in Southern California, but have been back and forth from coast to coast plenty of times between my education and my career. Currently, I'm working from North Carolina, but we'll see if that lasts. I earned my Bachelor's degree in 2017, and have a professional background in cybersecurity, devops, and software engineering.
I know a lot of people like to list languages and frameworks here, but realistically any knowledge I have from one source will transfer well enough to competently contribute in any project I may work on. Instead, I think the thought processes and methodologies that go into designing and building systems and software are much more interesting, so I'd like to discuss how my experiences have shaped the ways that I build software instead, and some of my more strongly-held design philosophies.
I am a nerd. I have been a nerd my entire life. I fully understand (and personally experience!) the sheer fascination with data that some people have. I would be lying if I said I didn't think about how cool and interesting it would be to look at a map of my local social network to try and identify potential friends! Wouldn't that be neat? But it's absolutely critical to take a step back and think about the consequences of collecting that information.
Let's do a little thought experiment with the project I just described, something of a mutual friend finder. It's not exactly a mutual friend finder, now is it? Because we aren't just looking for 2nd degree connections, we're looking for special 2nd degree connections, ones that we think we would hit it off with quickly. So we say "ok, let's look at some social circles". We probably belong to a few social circles ourselves, and surely they overlap to some degree. We just want to get into one or two more, expand our horizons.
There are a few problems with this though. Firstly, from a strictly selfish perspective, once we open the lid on something like this, we cannot expect to be able to close it again. The data we collect is a double-edged sword. Data can reveal really interesting things, patterns we might have never seen without the broader picture. But we won't always like that bigger picture. In our mutual friend finder, what happens when if we realize that, actually, we're kind of the odd one out. Our social circles are really just a small subset of much larger social circle, and the data really strongly suggests that we're being actively excluded. Nobody takes that well. From a more social perspective, this might be even worse. Doesn't it almost sound a little bit stalker-like? It would be perfectly reasonable for anybody to be wary of a person that's trying to figure out who every single one of your friends are. In the moment, our mind may frame it as a positive thing, we're simply trying to make some friends, and using the skills we have available to use. But again, are we really just trying to make some friends with something like this? Ask yourself, honestly, what you're really trying to get out of making something like this.
I grew up surrounded by evolving electronic devices. My dad has always liked trying out the latest and greatest things of the time. He loves to tell his story about the carphone he had installed back when that was a big deal to have. I grew up having my own Windows PC in my room, which was a big deal at the time because most of the people I knew only had a single, family PC. Computers genuinely had a significant role in my early development, too. My fascination with games like Spy Fox, Freddie Fish, and Pajama Sam made me teach myself how to read. I learned by having my parents read the game dialogue out to me, and working it out from there. This meant that I was on the internet really early in my life, earlier than most people my age, in the early 2000s. My experiences exploring the internet in the past are fond memories. The entire web felt like it was uncharted territory, ready to be explored. I played Neopets when I was young, and learned some HTML to customize my neopages, and I still distinctly remember my parents talking about "having me use my skill to design a family webpage for us". A family website! What a fun idea! I've never seen one before, and I don't know if I ever will!
I genuinely believe that a lot of the internet has steadily lost its charm over time, and this is entirely due to the corporatization of the web. At first it was a new frontier to explore, where people thought about what kind of website they wanted to have. Naturally, where the people go, so too shall the advertisers and the sellers, and so they steadily joined our ranks. New, successful website sprung up that brought in tons of users. Search engines, forums, and the like. What better promise could there be than guaranteeing that massive numbers of users see your ad? And so it gradually became more centralized. People no longer thought about having their own webpage, after all, they can get it all in the palm of their hands on a single website! But advertisers and companies are worried about "brand image" that the internet has become sterilized. There aren't as many people playing and exploring. Instead you get default bootstrap "responsive" webpages that are indistinguishable from each other.
The internet is a better place when it's weird. I want colorful, tile pattern backgrounds and crazy fonts and cursor trails and animated pixel art all over my screen. I want to visit a webpage and feel a sense of wonder and curiosity. But the vast majority of the web can never escape it, because they're bound by the rules of maintaining brand image.
