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My knee-jerk reaction is: no, Wi-Fi isn’t going away. But let me present a few Interesting Facts™ about the state of the internet today:
- 65% of all internet users are from developing countries.
- This percentage will increase dramatically in the next 5 years — usage in developing countries is growing 100x faster than in developed countries.
- 70% of users in developing countries rely on cellular data alone (no WiFi!) to access the internet.
- This number is lower in developed countries (10%-20%) but is increasing rapidly.
Taking these trends into consideration, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a world without Wi-Fi.
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Username checks out. :P
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If this sort of thing interests you and you have 25 minutes to spare, this talk by Tal Oppenheimer contains these facts and many more! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmg1ECC2r2Q
Edit: if you don’t have much time, here are some bits I found:
- 01:17 distribution of Internet users around the world https://youtu.be/Vmg1ECC2r2Q?t=77 (you can get the exact numbers here http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)
- 02:00 Internet usage growth in India is over 100x larger than any other country (sorry I mistakenly attributed this to “developing countries” in general) https://youtu.be/Vmg1ECC2r2Q?t=120
- 06:49 20% of US households rely only on cellular data to access the internet https://youtu.be/Vmg1ECC2r2Q?t=409
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On the other hand, these people from developing countries probably don’t have access to super-fast LTE either, so having access to Wi-Fi would be an improvement for them.
This number is lower in developed countries (10%-20%) but is increasing rapidly.
Where do these numbers come from? They seem pretty high given that free Wi-Fi is everywhere nowadays. Are there any “heavy” internet users in that group or is it just people who replaced SMS with WhatsApp and aren’t even aware they’re on the internet now? Those people never really needed Wi-Fi anyways.
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I’m finishing up the last finishing touches on our registration survey. We’re enrolling a thousand Kenyan farmers in a pilot program to make fertilizer and seed loans to them on credit. The app is one of the really vital pieces of this since we need to be collecting very high quality data to be able to base our credit prediction models on it.
I’m also realizing how great it would be to have another couple of engineers on my team and realizing that I’ve been neglecting hiring. Right now we’re super remote friendly, but I’d love to hire some folks in a similar timezone to Nairobi/Berlin. If anyone could introduce me to some nice developers in Germany/Czech Republic I’d love to make some friends there.
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Last week I was oncall, which was really frustrating. Oncall is currently “who is the engineer available to help us with whatever”, not “something is broken and requires your immediate attention.” Fine during the week, but very frustrating on Saturdays and Sundays. Also it’s hard to get other engineers on the rotation to investigate deeper than just fixing the issue on the surface, so the same issues keep popping up for months. Sigh.
I looked into why our test runner is slow, and wrote about it.
Hopefully this week I’ll have some time to go back into coasters. I have some good books from the library on genetic algorithms that I’m hoping to dig into.
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Two things are interesting about this week for me:
- It’s my first week on the Rust core team! More meetings, woo!
- It’s the last week of my contract with Mozilla. We have some legal stuff to sort out, but we’re hoping to get an extension going, though I may have a bit of a gap. I probably could use the vacation anyway :)
As far as my actual work goes, I’m waiting on one or two more changes to closures, so that I can finish up the last bit of long-form documentation. I’m also interested in making a large change to the formatting of the docs, going from this: http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide.html to this: http://steveklabnik.github.io/the_rust_programming_language/
The styling on the second is very, very basic, but I like the organization significantly more. Migrating this involves a lot of tooling work.
In hobby world, this week is the big tournament week for Netrunner, the card game I play. Different places around the city hold different tournaments at different times, and every so often, they all land on the same week. Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday are going to be busy!
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I wrote a blog post about this once: http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-do-you-find-the-time
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I’m guessing you meant AsciiDoc? We have a long thread about it on Discuss, but basically, Markdown has won so much mindshare, and is Good Enough, that we’re gonna stick with it.
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thoughtbot is hiring. We are a software consultancy, still small in the grand scheme of things (~90 folks) with offices in Boston, New York, London, San Francisco, Austin, and Raleigh. Lots of web based projects in Rails, Elm, React, etc. You can view our jobs here or reach out to me directly: edward (a) thoughtbot.com
I know that Thoughtbot is typically not open to remote workers - I live in Portland, ME, which is about 2 hours from Boston. I could come in to the office a couple of days per week if I could work remotely the remaining days. Do you know if the culture at Thoughtbot would support that sort of setup?
I realize you probably can’t speak for the entire company. :)
Hey @mosburger 🙂 I believe we’re not looking for remote workers at the moment, sorry. But if you are willing to make the commute I’d absolutely encourage you to apply. Sorry we can’t be more flexible.
Greetings from the 207!
I’ll vouch for Thoughtbot’s incredible friendliness. Everyone I’ve ever met from there has been a Gem.
I used to bump into a group of them in SF at a bar nearby there office after a training and I think they always said hi. Pleasant folks and they really care about software.