Just You Wait – Chris Shiflett

Chris Shiflett turned 50 in May and wrote a piece about it that I keep thinking about and that I kept marked as “unread” in my RSS reader to come back to it later. Now I found the time to reflect on what he has written. It is the story of a life spent with the web: BBSes and dial-up, the accidental slide into being a web developer, security work in the years when the standards we all still use were being written, eDonkey in New York, and then Brooklyn Beta, which he says is still the thing he is proudest of. I understand that part very well. ;) In the middle of the post he gets honest. He lost his spark somewhere along the way (and I can relate, like many of you, I guess). The web got rebuilt and stopped working, experimentation turned into extraction, the giants built their walls. He mentions that some of the people he admired most simply got quieter. He gave blockchain and Web 3.0 an honest chance, but none of it brought the feeling back. What did bring something back, he writes,…