I am a luddite and to me there is a lot of joy in technology. In technology that we deploy for all our wellbeing. Solar panels and vaccines, high-speed rail and wikipedia.
But they joy stems from the feeling of being able to be part of humanity in an embedded, meaningful way. Not from buying shit.
@tante My fondest experience in software was building (over ~9 years) an ERP system with the founding principle: "We want it to work for at least 30 years" which had a lot of knock-off effects. We were allowed to improve things that mattered more for maintenance than functionality.
The joy of being able to shift technology on the frontend with little effect to the backend, having response times in single digit ms and so on.
There was plenty to improve, still, but I had pride in my work.
It is a generic ERP-application with an open API - it was bought by EG (sadly VC-backed specialist software house) - they use it as the basis for two or three areas (construction, hairdressers and maybe health care). I left them about two years after the take-over which happened 2017.
The base system is here: https://xena.biz .
tante
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