Some of my Favorite Dead Things

Borders Bookstores

I miss bookstores a lot. Sure, they’re still hanging in there but the magic has long since dissipated. In the early 2000s I frequented the Borders bookstore in downtown Milwaukee. I would devour books on Final Cut, Flash, Dreamweaver, and the honorable DHTML. These design and technical books would span for columns and columns. It was always my dream to write a book and have it sitting on those shelves. By the time I finally got one published Borders was long gone. The limited space allocated to tech books at Barnes and Noble was now reserved for books like: Photoshop for Beginners and Squarespace for Dummies. 

Google+

Google+ never really caught on with any of my immediate friends or family. It wasn’t where my estranged classmates posted pictures of their kids or where a distant cousin might comment on my tech post with sarcastic understanding. It was freaking awesome. The concept was abstract enough to make it exactly what you wanted it to be, and that’s exactly what I did. It was the perfect forum because all I really wanted to share, or talk about was related to my hobbies and my career — both of which are the same, of course. I met a lot of great people in those circles, where conversations on Flex, Photography, or Game Development would roll on for pages. 

A series I wrote on the platform, me interviewing influential developers, gained a ton of traction. I had a voice and an audience that has yet to be matched since. Its bad rep, and eventual death were fueled by people who compared it to Facebook. It wasn't supposed to be Facebook! 

In a way, LinkedIn seems to be trending towards something that fills that void. Unfortunately, a lot of the topics that made Google+ great for me died with it. 

Gateway Computers

I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa where nothing ever happened. Nothing memorable anyway, except maybe the crash of Flight 232 and Gateway Computers. OK, technically the company is not dead, but do you or anyone you know work on a Gateway? Did you assume they were dead? I did.

In a way, it’s a bit ironic that I grew up in a town where a major player in the early PC era thrived, yet I didn’t actually want or own a computer until years after high school. But in any case, when I eventually got one it was a Gateway. It was the first computer I ever scanned a photo in to or burned a DVD with. I fondly remember my first video capture card haphazardly hanging out the side of the tower, barely clinging on by wires. 

Macromedia Flash

You may know it as Adobe Flash. You definitely know it as that thing you’ve been trained to hate and scoff at. In any case, Adobe acquired Macromedia sometime around 2005 and many Flash developers consider that to be the beginning of the end for the brilliant community that carried the web to the next level. Streaming video, animation, games, and async data techniques were first widely-adopted in web using Flash. With its Object Oriented language, Actionscript combined with the design-first timeline tooling, Flash was the first thing that truly clicked for me. I haven’t stopped coding since. 

We all know the story of its slow demise and the reasons behind it. I could write a whole article, or even book on that story. The truth is I owe my career to Flash. Whether you know it or not, you might too.