As a humble try to spread the word I did the Arabic Translation - الترجمة العربية of this post to encourage all the Arabic web specialists to share their opinion and have their say too.

So if you have any ideas, issues to discuss or suggestions, write about it, share what you have and express yourself with us.

“Art should be independent of all claptrap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.” by James McNeill Whistler

This movement included both literature and fine arts at that time but a while after people start to use this concept in different forms like Science for Science’s Sake and many others considering the wide meaning of art and what it can cover under its umbrella and so is the case with programming, which is an art, art of making beautiful and useful things. (I guess there no better quote than Graham’s here):

“What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They’re not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.” Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

Programming isn’t the same to all programmers, some consider it an art and a craft while others consider it a painful process to earn a living, that’s why I think Graham wanted to distinguish between programmers and hackers. Hackers according to Graham are the architects of the industry, the software makers who make their masterpieces with creativity and style.

Does History Repeat Itself?

One of the main factors that encouraged the art movement at the time it started was the Industrial Revolution when many crafts and work types lost their meaning and purpose because of a machine or a factory alternative, for example painting became more into an abstract art instead of being just a way to image how things looked like; specifically after Photography rise, new ways and styles of painting appeared, schools formed and being an artist got a different meaning.

This is happening now after the Digital Revolution and the rise of Information Age, many types of work lost their meaning, businesses became much easier, faster and more accurate with computers and high-tech devices, some of these crafts became an art where the rest died, products and services we used to pay a lot of money to get are much cheaper now or even available for free sometimes.

Programming is the act of making software for a computer or any other digital device, it is a result of the digital revolution and what operates it. Here we notice the difference compared to the art case in the 19th century, programming is one of the major weapons of the digital revolution, programming makes alternatives to many work types in real life so they lose their purpose for a computerized alternatives, where art used to be the victim of the industrial revolution as mentioned earlier.

Programming and Art are similar in different areas and from different aspects, it is a different scenario that may force programming to face similar destiny of art and be done for its own sake.

The New Concept of Competition

Programming itself evolved extensively during the past few years, the number of programmers grew dramatically and making software became an easier process as well, many programming languages and frameworks, many communities and methodologies and a completely different market shares for new software development companies.

The existence of communities such as the Open Source community gave programming a special feature in sharing and understanding, which caused a higher level of knowledge and a very quick development approach, programmers start to learn from each other and share their knowledge to help each other do something better or to complete the undone and has to be done.

In the other hand market giants adopted different approaches, some encouraged open source while others didn’t where in both cases as giants they had a very good position to take decisions and direct the market. The existence of the giants and open source communities made programming a high level industry in which the ability to be one of the giants isn’t affordable so programmers either wished to work for the giants or develop a product or service that gets the attention of a huge company that could possibly acquire it.

In my opinion when programming as an industry reach such a level of complexity (market and philosophy wise) it is natural to find a group of programmers who make software for the sake of it and not to compete or anything, just for enjoying what they are doing and share it with others.

What is Programming’s Sake?

Programming for Programming’s sake is when you write the code with creativity and passion, not only to serve users or to earn your living from it. It is when you make the software for the happiness and joy it brings to your heart, applying your methods and spending enough time refining your masterpiece to let it express you and the art you represent without allowing any other factors to affect your craft.

No matter if the program you are doing is already made before or how simple it may sound, when you give it the artistic quality of your mind it will be different from any other one that has ever been made.

Enjoying what we do is something that we all wish to do but sometimes we are afraid to do it or unable to do it because we don’t want or unable to give or sacrifice anything for it, we don’t want to lose our lifestyle, we don’t want to go for less but the question is: How much are we able to sacrifice for something that we really enjoy?

The Thin Line

It may sound simple but it is not, when it comes to real life it’s very difficult to be able to do what you like, do it for the sake of it and be able to live with it. In the past this has created a completely new culture of Bohemianism where bohemians didn’t care about the money or traditional life behaviours but cared the most about their own art, doing it for the joy of it and sacrificing everything in a very ignorant way in return.

It is a very thin line that one should be careful before crossing when it comes to sacrifice, life is full of responsibilities but at the end of the day it’s not important how much you are earning but how happy you are in your life, living without regrets of any sacrifices you made in the past. So I’m not saying that you should always do the programming for it’s own sake because I know how difficult this is, specially if you make your living out of it, but a parallel stream with your work will make you happier with your programming and will even make your programs more artisitc.

This whole idea may sound too bohemian and crazy to some people, but with all the craziness it has in it, I really believe in it and I believe that such concepts is a primary step in the life cycle of every craft, I know it is a very tough road to go through and the idea itself still requires some refining in my head which I will keep on posting about until I reach its best shape. If you liked the idea or disliked it go ahead, share your opinion here and let’s discuss it free and loud…

The software market moved from being a stand-alone application market into a hosted web application market, not even a web application market, instead of just selling the web application as a script, software companies preferred to keep the script in-house and leasing it as a hosted service for a modest monthly rate, clients are no longer required to have a server to host their web applications, users don’t have to install any new softwares, they all can have it hosted and maintained by software providers themselves.

This new concept has exploded a really big boom, a lot of new buzzwords are showing up everyday and a completely new market has been created too, all under the umbrella of the main buzzword behind all of this, the one we all hear many times a day, it’s Web2.0.

The Positives

The webification move is positive for both clients and software providers, for clients it reduced the need for a higher resources and this “System Requirements” stuff, all information are portable now and available online all the time, all what the user need is an internet connection with a decent browser to enter his online world of web apps accounts, no matter what operating system or even what’s the machine used to access it.

For software providers webifing their applications has solved many old problems, like support and upgrades, with desktop applications they had to contact each customer for an upgrade and when a bug fix is released it had to be sent to all customers, but now when their application is a web hosted service, they have full control over the software that everybody is using at the same time, they can upgrade, fix and maintain everything from one single place, it has reduced the total delivery cost.

The internet got a completely new face with this new concept, and many problems got solved and really simplified, there are many articles and blog posts about the advantages so I won’t go any longer with them, I prefer to talk a little about the negatives as I didn’t really see enough talking about them.

The Negatives

It may seem very lovely this idea of having everything available online all the time, but this doesn’t hide the negatives it has, and here I would like to talk about privacy and the credibility of these software companies that host our information. After everything became online, all our information are hosted with software providers, calendars with gcal, bookmarks with del.icio.us, projects with basecamp, photos with flickr, emails with gmail and many other web apps, our personal data are spread all over the internet with those software companies.

For example Google knows about me more than my family does, logging my search history, having my emails, calendars and even spreadsheets, not to mention if I installed google desktop, they can have access to all my files. Does this feel right? I think we are trusting Google as long as they are maintaining their credibility with us but what about the rest?

Now the boom itself has created a big problem in the market, it’s really unbelievable the amount of new web applications that are coming online everyday, mostly solving the same problem but in a little different way, most of them are free, this is good for the user at some point but not for software companies, everybody want to start a small startup and do his own business so we ended with a flooded market with dead web applications that has been made correctly but didn’t get any users.

I want to ask all software providers and all the new startups, please don’t try to re-solve a solved problem, the world is full with problems to be solved, pick an unsolved one and solve it, let’s not repeat ourselves and be as useful as we can for ourselves and for the community.

Another minor disadvantage of the webification process is the high dependency on the internet, all our information are stored there, if anything goes wrong, and we are unable to get connected, we are completely isolated and unable to access any of our data.

At the end of the day I look to my operating system and see that it is very clean with no installed applications, in the other hand I see my browser with many tabs opened to do my work, access my data and interact with my friends, I guess I’m completely webified despite all the negatives I’ve talked about here and I think I really enjoy it but with at least with few concerns that always in mind.

In any project and in every company during the planning stage, the owners and the creators start by studying the markets and see the benefits of each one in order to decide their target.

Now talking about web business, markets aren’t the same as in other businesses, we have a different kind of globalization in cyberspace, better communication facilities and a much wider audience, which leave us finally to the users judgment, the users who have too many options and choose only what best fits their needs.

Local Market

Local market, which is in my scenario the Middle East in general, and UAE in particular is one of the most fresh online markets right now, a gold mine, a lot of open opportunities, many ideas to be implemented and different kind of problems that have to be solved, but still there are many difficulties that every local web startup is facing, sometimes it’s the monopoly between the big local web firms, and sometimes it’s the misunderstanding of the real needs of the local internet user.

Replicating and Translating

Most of the local web applications currently are either being translated or replicated from another international successful web applications, I could rarely find a really creative competitive idea in here, something that is made for the specific requirements of the local market, not just a replication of what’s out there.

Local startups have this wrong impression that if an idea has worked globally and internationally then it have to and will work here too, but unfortunately this is not the case, if the web application does not support the local language (Arabic for example) or doesn’t have too many users from the local market, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be reimplemented or translated, maybe it means that it’s not made for our needs in the first place.

When we’re talking about the local market we should do something that fit our needs and solve our problems not just follow the hype and see what can be re-done just to simulate the same success story of an international replica.

Lack of Knowledge

One of the problems in the local market is the lack of knowledge of the cyberspace basics, I’m not saying that there is NOBODY who knows about Web2.0 or the new trends for example, but I’m talking about the percentage of those who know to all other local internet users..

How many of those who heard about these trends do really understand the meaning, for example few days ago I received one of these yahoo groups email circulars, that has “Jewels of Knowledge” as its subject and one of these jewels was: “What programming language is GOOGLE developed in?” and at the end of the email the answer was “Google is written in Asynchronous java-script and XML, or its acronym Ajax”. This is just an example of the low level of knowledge circulated and its lack of accuracy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which programming language Google used, but in the other hand such level of knowledge should be raised, so the local internet users get a better understanding of what’s available and what they can get instead of just recycling what’s made for them and accept anything only because there is no alternatives.

Educating the internet users isn’t easy, and to give the right information is something very crucial, one of the most successful tries I’ve seen so far is Serdal a blog by Abdullah Al-Muhairi who has done a great job, writing and lecturing in Arabic about the new trends, demonstrating and explaining most of the new technologies, we need more of these tries, at least to build a solid knowledge background for the user to let him see what’s available and ask for more, ask for better.

The knowledge of the end user encourages the competition and makes the market more healthier, look at the Japanese market for example, the high level of basic internet knowledge every user have, they are always asking for more, and the competition became really harder, which made their products and services more enhanced and better shaped to give the users better satisfaction and more real solutions.

Low Level of Competition

Competition is the best motive to improve ourselves, you want to be better than your competitors so you start improving your products and skills, the more competition there is in the market the more healthier it is, and the better and competitive products and services will be.

Locally the competition is very low, sometimes it’s due to the outdated skills available and sometimes due to the monopoly of the big companies, those companies that insist on hiding the “lamp” and always trying to convince us that the “candle” is the only available mean of light.

There were and still are many tries to do something new, fighting all the way to deliver the best solutions available, but yet they are very few, few to the level that they are hard to find, I really find these tries very positive and sure they will be the pioneers or the local market and hopefully they will be more soon.

I hope the local market will reach the level of tough competition to have a better and healthier market, which will encourage us to join and compete by trying to deliver a better solutions instead of just being the first to copy these solutions from the international market.

Wider Audience

One of the best advantages of cyberspace now is the wide audience you can speak to and target, normally starting a business is limited to how far you can deliver your product or service to, which was very small circle in the past, but now in cyberspace, this start circle is big already, the easy access for the end users to reach your products and services by simply type the URL of your site to be in your world, your application is deliverable to every plugged user to the net.

Such an advantage should be used wisely, the solution of the problem should be generalized to serve a wider range of users not only for a specific country of city. When a web applications is served in Arabic for example, we are not targeting only a small city or even one country, but we are targeting every internet user who speaks Arabic wherever he/she is.

Why International Then?

So local or international? personally I chose the international market because I found it more beneficial to me than the local market, I’m not saying that the local market is not good, maybe it is a mine of gold, but not a mine of knowledge, at least not for me.

Internationally I find better knowledge and more competition which helps me develop myself and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, I couldn’t do this while working for the local market.

The tough competition and the variety of solutions available internationally always have motivated me to do more and learn more, not to mention the great opportunity of meeting new people with better knowledge that I can always learn from.

What about you? what do you prefer? working for the international market, or target the local market? and why?

Every human being have a dream, a target or even a problem to solve, and sure there are many others out there with the same hopes, when they start to contact each other, trying to help each other and get united to achieve their shared goal they start the community seed.

Equal Participation

Every community out there is created to achieve something, a better understanding of a new concept for example, spreading a new trend, sharing some knowledge, or even having better discussions, the community in general (not only the cyber community) has the power to do this, so what is more powerful in the online community? I quote here:

“… Communication from many people to many people is close to the norm in cyberspace. This opens participation in decision making, creating the potential for conclusions to be reached in more egalitarian ways than are available offline…
… The inclusion of people in offline decision making is limited by the need to meet together, to speak only one at a time, to overcome the hierarchies of identity…” Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace by Tim Jordan

The ability to contact each other without any time borders, to express ourselves more freely, to speak (many) at a time instead of one at a time, allows us to be more effective and social, speaking freely without any hesitation or limits. Online community strengthen our individual cyberpower and crystallize our cyber identity to give us at the end a credibility that represent us and our community as well.

Information Overload and Credibility

Now the information overload problem has an alternative solution, when we want to search for information online we try to find the community that powers this type of information and see if it can provide us with the desired knowledge, this has solved two problems, the information overload and the credibility issue, not as a complete solution but at least as an alternative one.

Technology has helped the online community to evolve faster and to be of more benefit, new technologies like blogging, wikis and news feeds optimized the information flow between community members and their followers, for example if you want to follow up the web standards news and stay in touch with all its development, simply you have to subscribe to the community leaders feeds and now you are in touch.. if you know what they know then you know everything. The information power again, the core of cyberspace.

Back to credibility, every online community has its own credibility that got initiated by the very first members, and this credibility has been maintained while members are joining and leaving this community since then, but whenever a new member join, he gets his share of this credibility as if it’s a certificate, people will have a better reason to trust him, as long as they trust his community.

Online communities are becoming more popular day after day, many people are finding salvation in it, a place to speak freely, to contact these with the same interests and to achieve a shared goal, recently I have joined the diet contest community, trying to achieve the goal of losing weight and get back in shape with all the other participants from all over the world, this is a live example how no matter what is the goal or how simple it is, there are always a lot of people who wants to do it and start a community.

Not only towers and buildings or architecture work have a construction stage, we as human beings do construct ourselves too, these years of our twenties when we are working over 15 hours a day to accomplish the unaccomplished and reach the stars, since we are students and after we graduate, putting our dreams, setting our targets and planning for them, then begin the hard work, we start The Construction Stage.

The Two Ways

Whether we are planning to build a successful career and a secure job, or planning to be self employed and independent, in both cases the construction stage is the key to achieve this target, the way we go through and build our assets and our understanding to it.

Career

In the career scenario the target is clear, to find the right job with the right employer that believes in you, utilizes your skills and gives you as much as you give. This job that you will grow with while you are sure that as long as you are doing better, you will get promoted and raised.

Finding this job is the difficult part, after college as a fresh graduate with no experience or practical knowledge, maybe you will spend few years in different jobs until you find your target, meanwhile working on yourself, making better references and gaining respectful experience, this is your construction stage.

Self-employed

Starting a business is not that difficult as it was before, specially if you have the skills and you are able to do it as your profession and craft, but it is more complicated than the career scenario. To go solo you need a capital, resources, you have to build a reputation to move with, not to mention the other responsibilities that you may have, some people have a backup support by their parents or partners, but others don’t and they are fully responsible about their choice and have build it on their own.

One of the reasons why starting a business is more difficult and complicated than building a career is that the employee in general get motivated and encouraged by his management to do more and develop himself, while in the other hand in the solo business situation requires more optimality and strong believe in the self and the dream project itself in order to move forward.

When you are working solo you don’t get encouraged, you are the one who have to take care about everything, the competition the bills, the salaries (if you have employees), and the business itself too, while the employee will take care of himself and his personal skills only as his employer will take care of the rest.

The Hard Way

When your target is to be self employed but at the same time you have bills to pay, then you have to find a job that at least pays your bills and gives you enough time to develop yourself and prepare for the solo move.

I call such a job the Backup Job, it’s the security job, when you are able to secure your life and pay your bills, even save some money to start your own business, it is not the dream job that you are looking for, and not the job that you will get promoted in and do what you love, it is just a job where you do what you know even if you don’t like.

Sometimes even after starting solo business without good planning you may reach the point that you have to do something you don’t like to survive, doing projects that you don’t believe in just to have enough income to support yourself and meet your responsibilities, this is very much related to your planning, if your plan is solid and you did construct well you will not need to do this, and you will be in the exact position you wished for, choosing your own clients and doing the kind of projects that you are really enjoying, not doing them just for the money.

At The End…

It is not just a matter of choice or dream, it’s how much do you believe in your target, and how strong is your will to achieve it, or else why there are many people still working in the same unpromising job for the last decades.. in my opinion it’s either their will that wasn’t enough to help them achieve, or maybe their situation was so bad and they had too much responsibilities to take care of so they didn’t have enough time for themselves.

Back to the four-day week challenge, in the construction stage, I think it should be The 24/7 Challenge depending on our situation, as long as we are in the construction stage the hard work and the believe in what we are doing will take our time at least until we reach a decent position and have the ability to take the four-day week challenge.

Personally I’m in the middle of this stage, what about you? did you build your assets, still planning, or did you already hit your target? share your opinion with us here and let’s learn from each other.

No matter what our nationalities are, or where we live, once we are plugged and connected we enter this virtual world, this reminds me with the Matrix movie where they had to be plugged in order to get into the Matrix, although I don’t agree with its negative view of the AI evolution, I prefer Isaac Asimov way of humanizing the machines by giving them feelings and not taking them as enemies, but in both cases the question is about the new technologies and what new concerns they will make. What about cyberspace? Hasn’t it given us a strange power as individuals?

Information Overload

When we decide to dig for a piece of information, few years back we used to get short with the found information from books and papers or even asking experts, spending a lot of hours and we still feel that a lot is missing, but now online by surfing the web for few minutes we can find more than we need, we start selecting, choosing, and filtering, there are a lot of results and alot of answers for the same topic we are looking for. When google gives you over a milion search results it’s impossible to see them all, you will filter and choose, this is the information overload, it has even created the new concept of procrastinating where we start going from site to another and forgetting what we were doing in the first place.

Information overload has given us this individual cyberpower, being able to find any information about anything at anytime. We feel powerful and able to seek anything, like if we have it all in our minds, we are not afraid of difficult questions, but we developed our skills to find them and filter the results effectivly.

Having more knowledge and the ability to learn faster have encouraged people to produce more than consume, like this article for example, there are many resources online about cyberspace and cyberpower, but I felt that I have another vision so I didn’t hesitate to share it online, another source, another information overload, and it’s up to the users and readers to choose from.

Different Identity

For individuals cyberspace has opened new gates, bypassing censorship, participating in decisions, the ability to know the forbidden and even share all of this, this power is still evolving, with the revolution of Web2.0 people are not only consuming and producing information online, but they are interacting with it, and developing new types of information, wikis and web applications, everybody has his own home (account) in every website, it’s not only being plugged, now it is being logged in too.

Whatever you are in real life, whatever your work is, or your physical conditions are, it doesn’t matter, it’s just about your ability to use the computer and surf the web, and you’ve got this power, in cyberspace there are no nationalities or skin color or lifetime disability, you can be what you want even if you can’t be it in real life.

We still hear a lot about people who fake their identities online, sometimes it is not really faking as much as it is showing the real inner personality that they can’t show in real life, expressing some sort of ideas that they can’t express in real life, or they don’t have anybody to share it with.

Credibility

What about the credibility of these information and knowledge online? How much are they trustable and how much they are not? It is interesting how some individuals has developed a new way of trust, it’s not about reading the information, they prefer to know who wrote it, or where is it from, they check the site name, the writer name and sometimes they dig to check their credibility, this may sound a good way, but at the end not all internet users are able to judge their sources.

In the other hand it became more difficult on the authors themselves to maintain and establish this credibility, there are no jury to judge them, it’s their readers who will trust them or not, anyhow credibility is still a big unsolved issue in cyberspace that require some more research and work.

Cyberspace is a space that powers the individuals and get powered by them, cyberpower is really a huge subject with a lot of things to discuss, in this article I tried to summarize the individual cyberpower from my point of view, there are still some other cyberpowers to talk about like the community power, and the giants power, which I’ll be posting about shortly.