Mikeal Rogers Profile picture
Hacker of a certain age.
Jul 14, 2020 12 tweets 2 min read
The response to “cancel culture” by elites is interesting, because they are bemoaning a phenomena that poor and working people have always lived through: That certain beliefs and speech get you pushed out of opportunities for advancement unless you have inherited wealth. When I was growing up in a poor semi-rural area, the everyday language people used was overtly white supremacist and anti-gay. Common terms for things had the “n-word,” anything you disliked was “gay.”

It wasn’t just that there we no consequences, it was accepted everyday speech
Feb 3, 2019 18 tweets 3 min read
Node.js, Go, and Rust were all released within a year about 9 years back.

Here's what I remember about that time. There had been what seemed like an explosion of new platform languages and then a contraction. Perl and PHP felt like they had given way to Python and Ruby although Ruby was the star at the time, Rails was really taking over.
Jan 14, 2019 4 tweets 2 min read
Super excited to launch ProtoSchool! proto.school A web based platform and community for learning decentralized technology. In addition to being a full web-based hands-on tutorial platform, ProtoSchool is also building a community of local chapters for in-person workshops using the web workshop content. proto.school/#/host
Aug 8, 2018 9 tweets 2 min read
The more I think about it, these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) aren't "social" and they aren't agnostic "publishers" they are something I can only describe as "Network Effect Arbitrage Machines." [Thread] A cursory reading of these platforms would be that they take user generated content, publish it for free, and sell ads against it.

But this is too simplistic.
Jul 2, 2018 21 tweets 4 min read
It's been about 8 years since I wrote the original proof-of-concept for PouchDB. github.com/pouchdb/pouchd…

In that time, we haven't seen a significant increase in offline capable applications. I'm going to talk a bit about why that is. [Thread] In 2010 it was clear that we needed new standards. AppCache was awful, WebSQL was dead (Firefox committed to *not* implement it). From 2010 - 2015 or so all the focus was on driving those standards, first IndexedDB and then Service Workers.
Jun 2, 2018 20 tweets 4 min read
I'm going to have a little thread here about platforms, inspired by Ryan's release of deno. [Thread]

The release of a new platform is innevitably framed by everyone as a disruption to existing platforms. This zero sum view of platforms is true in the personal sense, most people choose one platform over another, but is entirely incorrect in the macro sense.
Sep 18, 2017 12 tweets 2 min read
Thread: we could see the erosion of the W3C all together. eff.org/deeplinks/2017… Unlike TC-39, which has measures of legal control over the JavaScript language, the W3C has no exclusivity over specs that make the web.