A human in tech

A friend recently pointed out how I've always introduced myself as a "long time human in tech" on my socials. It got me thinking: what does it actually mean to be a human in tech (towards the end of 2026)?

I remember a time in the early 2010s when it was so exciting to do everything online. Create a profile, share, check-in... Remember Foursquare? I was the mayor of both my living room and my office. It was so cool to check-in at places, unlock badges (or even take a detour when driving to work to chase the little candy dots Waze showed on the map that levelled your avatar).

Getting into indie app development around 2017 was also a lot of fun. Everyone was posting their latest creation, sharing code snippets and better ways they'd found to make table views more performant or battle with auto layout constraints.

Oh, remember swizzling? 🤭

It was fun and it created a sense of community and belonging. After all, the goal was to try to create something that was both useful and delightful. It was more about crafting and building useful things that someone would download and use and hopefully (maybe?) even pay for.

Fast forward to 2026 - more than 4 years since Twitter disintegrated into X. There are still people trying to recreate the "good old days" but #BuildInPublic just isn't the same anymore. What was once a source of inspiration has become a river of sameness (not surprising, I mean... when was the last time you used a custom icon in your app?).

I think the desire to show off the craft of building a delightful thing has somehow morphed into showing off platform capabilities. A tech demo of supporting the iPhone Duo, a tech demo of adopting Liquid Glass, a tech demo of a pop-over, a tech demo... it's not about the user anymore, is it?

Of course, this is focused on "walled garden" type of ecosystems. Every phone maker has the wet dream of having thousands of developers constantly promoting their products (even when they don't really deserve the promotion). Of course everything is amazing and fantastic. Don't forget to get the latest. FOMO all the things.

As 404 Media recently put it, the state of things has transitioned from "Think Different" to "crowdpleasing hardware gimmicks". What was once a community of creators and people who happen to enjoy building amazing software for amazing hardware has been reduced to a cog in the tech economy. Everything is about more of everything - more ads, more apps, more videos, more content...

I’ve been growing into the hot take that good user experience alone should absolutely never be the deciding factor for critical services. Don't be held hostage by a single big corporation from the other side of the world.

We humans tend to enjoy the path of least resistance and unfortunately for all of us, a couple of very rich people have found a way to monetise all that. Think about this when you're adding the latest "first party" platform feature to your app - are you doing right by your users? Do they have a way out?

Empathy is what keeps us human. If you want to stand out, to differentiate yourself in the sea of slop, you need to show that you can be trusted to do right by the people who use your app.

I recently watched a really cool talk about Mindful Design. It's amazing and you should definitely watch it.

Take a moment to consider whether your future self will be happy with your decisions today.

Another fantastic talk touching on the topic of Local First software. If you're at all involved in making apps, regardless of ecosystem, it's a must watch.