Day 10: Here, take this while I make something better
My mind is abuzz with visions of the future and where me, my family and the rest of Singaporean society stands in that vision. (Of course I’m thinking about Singapore — it’s all I really know at this point.) The stimulus? Wired UK’s 4-part documentary on Shenzhen. They’ve officially dubbed it— and by others unofficially for a while now — the Silicon Valley of hardware. It’s slightly redundant, since Silicon is the stuff of hardware, isn’t it? Anyway, here are a few things I took interest in:
Open source hardware in Shenzhen
Apparently innovators in Shenzhen have known to work with an open-source philosophy for a while now. In Shenzhen, passing around someone’s supposedly proprietary blueprints is considered sharing, not stealing. It’s difficult for most people to swallow, but I think it might just be more civilised than the “lawyering up” and corporate bullying that is the unfortunately the foundation of business in the United States.
Also, as Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang, a hacker and maker and all-round intelligent guy (who also happens to live in Singapore now) alluded in the documentary, it’s weird that wealthy corporations that don’t innovate anymore continue to make more money just by sitting on existing patents and filing lawsuits.
In Shenzhen, it’s about innovating faster than your competitor. It’s about coming up with the next better thing before anyone else manages to. Patents are still in the repertoire of a business, but they are used almost exclusively to retain value during ownership transfers at the sale of the company to another entity, or for other specific business transactions like licensing agreements.
Hardware companies must master branding
Although companies are built on copying and improving other companies’ design and engineering in Shenzhen, the fact that consumers, including Chinese ones, are still snapping up original Apple products and Louis Vuitton bags at 5–10 times the price of gao fang huo (top quality counterfeits) is testament to the importance of branding.
Oh, and apparently this ‘open-source’ copying culture is called shanzhai. It literally means “mountain village”. (I speak mandarin and don’t even know how that means that and how it has anything to do with open-source copying.) And this shanzhai has its roots in the early proletariats of booming Shenzhen. Good, hardworking and smart guys working in the factory floor had enough of being pushed around by lazy, incompetent and nepotist managers, took copies of the blueprints of products, and set up their own factory producing things at a fraction of their costs.
A Chinese guy who is notable for launching the first maker space in China who was interviewed in the documentary said that open source hardware movement is about 5 years from becoming mainstream. He likened this transition to the mainstreaming of the open source movement (for software) in the early 2000s.
What I’m curious to know is,
What happens when open hardware goes mainstream?
I don’t know exactly, but I’m going to guess that the pace of innovation is going to accelerate.
Is that a good or bad thing? Probably bad for the environment as more people toy with 3D printers and circuit boards, making things and keeping them in the attic never to be used again. Material costs go down, production volume goes up, vice versa, and general waste goes up. Beyond that, it’s probably good in the sense that we would all have more toys to play with and distract us from the turmoil of everyday life. And there would probably be one or two hugely life-altering products to hit the shelves near you and me over the ensuing decade.
JavaScript methods are pre-written functions
I don’t have much to report in terms of actual technical learning today. Most of the things I went through in my GA pre-course work were things I had already known from freecodecamp.com.
One simple fact did sneak up on me though. I mean, it is a fact that was staring at me in the face all this while without me noticing it:
JavaScript methods are just functions that are built-in!
Methods are no different from the functions that any person who knows JavaScript syntax can write. They are just written once and stored in the kernel of JavaScript (whatever that is actually called), available for use by any programmer. It saves everybody time and the hassle of having to decipher more code.
What’s the big deal? This means that we are working off a large repository of already-written functions that perform the most used basic operations, like “add this to the end of that array”, or “find that HTML element with the ID of ‘important’”. But more importantly for me, knowing that methods are just functions written by someone else gives me the confidence — unfounded or not — to be able to write basically any function to perform any task. As long as I’m able to break a big task into smaller ones, and know how to link them up in order, what I’m able to do should be only bound by what the machine is capable of. That’s a big deal to me.
This post is part of my 30-day commitment to write daily about my journey learning something technical everyday. You can see my other posts at Getting Technical.
