I went on a scouting mission to the Apple Store today. This was going to be my first chance to hold and use an iPad mini. As an iPad 2 owner, I wanted to see if the new mini would work for me: is the screen too small? Is it too slow? I managed to fight my way through the crowds to spend about 15 minutes putting a black iPad mini through its paces.

In the year 2007, I was taking my first baby steps into the Cocoa development world. I was attending the C4 conference, and it was an experience with equal parts terror and enlightenment. Conference Badges, past and present. Left: C4[1] dog tags from 2007. Right: Çingleton 2012 I was a tourist: a web developer with pretensions towards Cocoa development. All the guys I met there were seasoned developers, whose examples were exciting, if not out of apparent reach.

I’ve been building web sites for some twelve years now. And I love what I do: using code to express an idea is a task that I approach, every day, with a sense of humility and honour. But if there’s one thing I really hate about being a developer, it’s that circumstance forces me to be less good at my job than I’d like. This job description, posted by a Denver-based Web development shop named CrowdFavorite, kind of set me off.

Sometime in April 2010, I read my first digital book on an iPad. In a fit of irrational exuberance, I decided from then on that I would no longer read paper books. I didn’t really plan for that decision to be binding, or even bear out in reality. But that’s exactly what happened: over the proceeding two-plus years, every book I read was made out of bits instead of atoms.

I’m perhaps more inclined than most to be first in line when the future arrives, and you never know when you get to the head of the line whether you’ll be handed a plate of bacon or a punch in the gut. With the iPad it was definitely the former. But the future isn’t entirely without flaw. While I believe firmly that the iPad is a new kind of general computing device, I don’t believe it’s completely there yet.