How Easy Things Became Hard and Hard Things Became Easy

Hard computing problems have become either trivially easy or so impossibly difficult it’s not even worth trying anymore.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The Moderna team that first created the COVID-19 vaccine designed it in two days. It was a weekend project in January. On Friday evening we had no vaccine, just a series of TGIF memes and an upcoming weekend to look forward to. On Monday morning we had the vaccine. I’ve spent longer than that trying to vertically center text on a webpage.

I say this as a joke, but it’s also kind of true (vertically centering is annoyingly difficult. If I’m lucky, I can wrangle it with flexbox when the wind is blowing in the right direction). A wonder of the modern world is that we can do incredible things, but get stuck on basic problems. Websites boast sophisticated authentication systems, machine learning, complex algorithms and then don’t render properly in Firefox. We have nailed the difficult problems but tripped over the easy ones.

Part of this, perhaps, is that things slip through the net. We are human and we err. The reason a site might not work in Firefox is not that the developer couldn’t get it to work; it’s because they forgot to check. There are so many different browsers and orientations: Firefox, Safari…