Bailey Blankenship — Software Engineer
Part One Of A Series Of Interviews With Experts In The Field
I am interviewing Bailey Blankenship, a software engineer with years of experience in the tech- and biopharma industry. Born in Denver in 1996, Bailey resides in Boulder, Colorado and graduated from North Carolina State University. In the interest of full disclosure — Bailey is the co-founder of a software company that I am actively involved with.
What was your earliest experience with software and computers?
At the age of 6, I was lucky enough to have access to a family computer, a Pentium IV running on Windows 98, or maybe it was already XP. I was totally fascinated by the Harry Potter “chamber of secrets” game. It was just fun and allowed me to tinker with the game, so I got hooked.
We moved to North Carolina in 2006, after growing up in Denver. There were two kids on the block who were also into computers. We pretended to be spies because it seemed like a cool thing. I created a website with Frontpage 2003 after my uncle got me a webspace through Godaddy. I soon realized that this website was allowed through my school’s firewall, while many of the game sites were blocked. So, I started downloading games from other sites and uploading them to mine. By the end of 6th grade, I was providing access to 20–30 games, and students across the district were using my site. Even years later, people would ask me if I was the Bailey Blankenship of www.baileyblankenship.com.
You started with gaming. Is there a strong connection between gaming and software development? I remember reading about Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, being a devoted gamer
Half a generation ago, video-games were different. When you wanted new content, you had to figure out how to modify the game. This led to a lot of software tinkering for younger folks. With many modern games, new content is accessed through in-app purchases, which has turned videogames into more of a consumptive hobby.
We will always see rapid changes of culture through technology. We will see where the current state of gaming takes us. Some games, especially those with in-app purchases, feel like they’re taking away the culture of community-created content. But there’s been a huge increase in beginner-friendly game development tools, so hopefully more young minds are able to turn their passion for gaming into a software engineering career.
I recently read that software developer is the most popular job in the world. At the bottom of the ranking are retail shop assistants. Do people have the right idea of what a software developer does?
Clearly, making good money is still a goal for most people, so it makes sense that it’s a desirable job. Software engineers are some of the highest paid engineers, and they’re a crucial addition to many teams, so there’s no shortage of work.
The particularly great thing about being a software engineer is the freedom that comes with it. Freedom to work from any location, pick your own topics, choose your own tools. If you are a mechanical engineer, you may spend most of your time on the shop-floor, so it’s definitely less cushy than software engineering.
In other dreams, I would love to work in industrial design. And Jony Ive is an absolute hero of mine.
Among other things, Marc Andreessen is famous for saying software eats the world. Is that true? And why is most of the innovation that we come up with so focused on software?
Software automates tasks and advances civilization. Surely, too many people spend eight hours a day to earn a subsistence income, but that’s changing. More people will be able to generate passive income through products that they create with nothing but a computer. In the end, we are all in a battle for quality of life and going through a cultural correction — more freedom, location independence, work less to satisfy fundamental needs.
You can do everything with software, the limitations that remain are our creativity and thought. That being said, in some ways we are using software too little to solve real problems. Instead, we are creating too many things that just feel cool and are purely ornamental, such as WiFi controlled fridges. Who needs a WiFi controlled fridge?
What will the next 10–20 years bring to software and software developers?
Software is not going away, and you don’t even know what it will be able to do for you. Also, looking at past inventions, they are all still around — we still need locomotives, 200 years after they were invented.
I expect some big leaps to come from quantum computing and artificial intelligence or machine learning, using those terms interchangeably. Quantum computing is great for addressing problems of statistical analysis. For example, if you look at route optimization between many locations, a traditional computer can only solve the problem sequentially and in rather dumb ways. A quantum computer operates more like the human brain — considering many possibilities and selecting the best outcome. This will have massive implications for security and make an entirely new class of problems easily solvable by computers.
The allure and novelty of blockchain technology may fade out, but the spirit of social freedom that’s been behind it, will prevail and so will the technology.
Technology always moves slower than we think it does. We expect too much to happen in a short time period and we underestimate how much changes in the long run. If you watch Blade Runner (1982), the time since its first showing has not been enough to make its visions come true, which is good a thing in some cases — just think about the replicants.
AI will run amok in many ways, just think about deep fakes and voice replication. Our definition of street smart will have to evolve quickly, so we can cope with that.
One last question: where will Bailey be in 10–20 years?
I will hopefully still be involved with our current company, Zentyment, and achieve financial independence. In other plans, I want to start my own VC firm and support non-traditional startups. Eventually, I want to go back to teaching and be a high-school teacher. That’s always been my life’s dream!
