Monday morning tech quarterbacking

I was having a discussion with a friend yesterday where part of it veered into those ideas that we, as developers, might kick ourselves for not having seen coming and developing a solution for ourselves.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20, so in a few years we'll be kicking ourselves about the ideas being developed now that we could have been doing too.

Here are some of the ones that I think about.

I feel like I should have put 2 and 2 together and realized how big IM would be. Back in junior high school in '86/'87 when I had a Leading Edge IBM clone running DOS and a 1200 baud modem, I was dialing into the school system's PDP/11 network and chatting on a program called 'dialog'. A few years later in high school we had a VAX cluster and a VT220/240 in every class room, and everyone's favorite thing to do was get on and use a program called 'talk'.

In the late 90's I grabbed an internet domain for personal use with the intent it would be to update periodically with recent happenings in my life or just things I wanted to write about. Uh, blogging.

Again in the late 90's, after New Oak was acquired and people started to leave, I tried to put together a web site where each person had a page that had information about where they were and their recent contact information that I would manually maintain. It was also common back then for tech folks to maintain "alumni mailing lists" for people that had left a company. LinkedIn anyone?

A problem I've bumped into a number of times over the years is sharing files online. Essentially wanting to get large files to another person, and not wanting to email the file. Since I have a domain and hosting I generally FTP it up and give the person a link to FTP it down. Yesterday I came across a company, drop.io, where the founders had that problem too and decided to build a solution for it so everyone could easily have the solution too.

Now, I'm not saying that it should be me with the successful companies around these ideas. But at some level I feel like it wasn't *such* a stretch to see that a general solution could be developed to a problem that I was personally coming across or a desire that was obviously there. So I feel that maybe I should have at least had a go at it.

Which leads to the present. Lots of ideas, and hard to know which one to pursue. I'm sure I must be encountering things that I do manually that could be done better as a general solution. But will I see them before they are in the rear view mirror?