There is a fascinating 2019 photo essay of Kashgar that I link to in my post remembering my trip in 2004, when Kashgar looked a lot different from now (I include a few pics)
This is a great thread! So many interesting topics. Awesome to see.
For me, at the moment, it is internet governance. Kinda like getting involved in local city council politics, but at internet scale. There are so many ways to get involved it is confusing... and it often seems so abstract for an everyday dev, especially if you are just a frontender like me. I have been interested in governance for a while, but had my first participation opportunity at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto last month, and have been slowly blogging some of my learnings:
It has motivated me to interact more with the IETF and W3Cs. Like local politics, this stuff actually is important... even if the entire community does not participate.
Tangential comment, but considering there are many computer people here, I would highly recommend Jon Corbett's talk at Causal Islands on Indigitalization: Indigenous Computing Theory, which features a Cree-language keyboard design of his own making!
We use Deel and have employees and contractors in 9 timezones. We are a fully distributed team of 23 people. Deel has been a lifesaver in terms of abstracting away a lot of the compliance and payroll issues. I am a huge proponent.
Deel owns most of its entities in its 150+ countries (it used to be less, but they have built out there network a lot in the past year or so).
$599 is not a bad rate, considering all of the overhead to setting up an entity, benefits, and hiring a regional manager than can deal with all the local stuff. You have to get to a good 15-20 people in a specific country before it makes sense to switch to your own entity.
EDIT: One thing that Deel does _not_ solve is visa sponsorships. They only do this very rarely AFAIK.
The two best books I read this year, and have been recommending widely are:
"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by Graeber and Wengrow since it really shows how narrow our political imagination has been for the last 250 years, and makes me excited by people looking for new ways to organize.
"The Ministry for the Future" by KSR, which has further radicalized me and challenged me to spend more of my time fighting the climate crisis.
Fighting climate change… what do you have in mind… what can folks in (soft) tech do?
I’m equally interested but lacking in imagination currently how software can have a bigger impact.
All the big impactful things are in hard tech, ie changing industrial processes, new / improved material design, renewable energy production, reducing energy waste or waste in general etc and planting tons and tons of trees at scale - best carbon capture and ecosystem restoration tech we have I think.
But for all that we need to have the political will, which is not sufficiently present at the moment. Too many counter forces preventing systems change. So how do you address that?
If you could come up with an effective method of combating stupid on internet you could have an immense effect on climate change. Or trolls or fossil shills or bad faith actors etc.
Even solar power needs interfaces. One of those interfaces will likely be through the Web. There will be work to be done that requires normal Web dev in that area.
