The half-way point for the decade of the 2010’s can best summed up by a few things that happened to me in the past couple days:

1. I spent $12 to purchase 12 months of web hosting. That doesn’t even cover the electric bill for the laptop I will use to set the site up. Cloud computing resources are unbelievably cheap.

2. I used Google today to look up the address for the office I work in. It is printed on all my business cards, but it is just easier to use Google copy/paste than to find a business card and type it in.  Information is unbelievable easy to access.

3. To save money in the next couple months, my company has cancelled all travel not mandated by a customer contract. We are all traveling less, and yet working more on teams that are distributed over larger areas. Communications allows unbelievable levels of collaboration.

4. A single professor in Holland gave completion certificates to 1,690 students from all over the world on the subject of Process Mining. And the course was free. Over the holidays, I discovered a new JavaScript framework, and I found a dozen hours of free videos explaining how to use it. Learning can scale to unbelievable levels.

5. I heard a rumor today that President Obama was disbanding the U.S. Marines. In spite of amazing resources to vet information with multiple sources: Wild, unsubstantiated, and crazy stories are repeated further and faster than ever before (by people who behave otherwise perfectly sane.) Critical thinking is unbelievably poorly exercised.

We are in a time of wonders. Some day we will look back on this year, and say; “Those were the good old days.” However, we will mostly think of them as unbelievable.