Why I’m writing the “Generation Z Developer” book

Hi Generation Z Developer, if you are passionate developer who wants to learn as much as you can about your craft, this is the book for you (currently under heavy development and available for free).

I decided to write this book after doing a series of presentations to Gen Z audiences, where I realised a number of key gaps in your generation is understanding of the history behind a number of key technologies that underpin the technological revolution that we are the in middle of.

Here is the slide that started it all, how many do you recognize?

My presentation started by me asking the audience if they recognized those logos, and then realising that not only they didn’t recognised most of the logos, they didn’t knew the history behind them. More importantly why they where created, and what was the problem (or itch) they addressesed

All these icons where ‘catalysts of change’ and it is important to understand the history behind them, why they occured, and what happened next

Each one of these icons changed the world of technology, and the paradigms shifts that they created and still impacting our world today.

For example one of these changes/revolutions was the Creative Commons copyright license, which was one of my ‘WFT you don’t know what that means’ realizations. Creative Commons gives a number of rights to the consumer of creations. This book is release under an ‘Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0’ license, which basically means you are free (as in freedom) to use all the materials and content from this book (only requirements are that you provide some acknoledgement of the source and that you use a similar license). You can even sell books based on content from this book.

As you will seen thorough the book, what I find interesting, is not that that a particular technology or ideas allowed X to happen. What matters to me are the ways those ideas change how we act, how we think and how we behave.

We are in the middle of a massive technological and cultural revolution and you need to decide if you want to be a pawn, a player or even a play-maker in this new world. If you don’t understand the past, you are bound to not only repeat past mistakes, but you will not even understand what game is being played.

Please join me in this interesting trip down memory lane, where I will try to explain how I understand and learned from a multitude number of technologies, ideas and events.

Are you a Gen-Z? (or have a strong view on the above). If so:

• What do you think of this book?
• Do you agree that is needed?
• Is this relevant to your Generation?
• What topics should I cover?

Please add your comments below or open an Issue at this Github repo

This is taken from from the Generation Z Developer book, available at https://leanpub.com/generation-z and released under an Creative Commons licence at this GitHub Repo