In 2005 when I and a small team of folks started working on Writely, which eventually became Google Docs, the technology around what came to become called “Web 2.0” was in its infancy. Javascript had been around for a while (in fact, I remember checking how many installed browsers supported it - 80% at the time!) but it wasn’t widely used. Just Gmail had done a significant application with it. Browser VMs were buggy and slow, there weren’t many systems to support coding (even JQuery came later). And on the server side, things were similar - people were building web apps but not much of what we would call the cloud really existed in a broadly accessible way.
The answers to these problems were known, more or less, but as an engineer, you had to deal with a lot of mess, flakiness, unsolved problems, and just general hassle. But! It was becoming fairly clear that there was a “there there” to many of us - lots of folks were slogging through this mess and building great solutions and companies.
At the early stages of anything, it’s easy to look at emerging technologies and see only the problems, and to focus on those issues. These are the “why not” questions we’ve discussed here before. They’re valid, but they don’t really help you as an individual. The better questions are the “what if” ones.
The right time to begin building something interesting with new tech isn’t when it’s “perfect” or easy. By then, it’s too late. Our job as engineers is to solve problems - if you wait until someone else has solved them, you can still add value, but your opportunity to do so will be diminished significantly. The right thing to do is to dive in! And the right time to do it is when things are messy, hard, and uncertain.
There are always problems to be solved with new tech, and the current wave is no different. Some of the problems are real, and hard, and will shape what’s possible, and some are less hard and can be solved with a little care and energy. The key is to not mind the mess - pick something interesting to try to do, and wade in.
If everyone waited for it to be easy, it never would be.