After decades of waiting and a few false claims of Back to the Future Day arriving early, the one, true Back to the Future Day is here!
While we don’t have flying cars, hoverboards, or Pepsi Perfect that’s in stock, we still have some pretty ridiculous stuff. When I first saw Back to the Future II (I think I was 6?), I got home and begged my mom to buy me a my first skateboard; I wanted to start practicing for when hoverboards became a reality!
I think the 6-year-old me would be profoundly disappointed about the actual state of technology in 2015. However, what that kid couldn’t have imagined was how utterly nuts 2015 would actually be. I was thinking about it this morning a lot.
Instead of getting to see Jaws 19 in theaters, I founded a kind of company that would have been inconceivable in 1989. I mean, the first web browser wasn’t invented until a year later in 1990! How could 6-year-old me ever have imagined that on the same day that Marty McFly traveled to, I’d be working at a “virtual” company where I’m able to do everything I need to do from a computer console?
The UpBuild team works from wherever they want and connects to a massive information network (wirelessly!) to measure and optimize “web sites” (something completely formless and intangible by the standards of the 80s). That completely blows my mind. The other day, I was eating lunch and simultaneously helping someone on my team debug computer code (i.e. JavaScript) by using a 6-inch pocket computer that was connected wirelessly to her computer miles away, yet we troubleshot the problem as easily as if we were meeting face-to-face. What’s up with that?
In one of our weekly standups (that we do via video chat, naturally), the UpBuild team was geeking out about Back to the Future Day and it’s that kind of stuff that really causes me to marvel at things we now consider “normal”. If I don’t get to ride a hoverboard just yet, I think I’m okay with that (I’m over 30 now, I could break a hip ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) – There’s plenty of equally cool or cooler things in the future right now.
