I hear you. After couple of years in the same spot things can become stale. I found that the way for was to start my own small projects to learn additional skills. I started to post to medium describing what I thought might be useful as a tool for other devs. In parallel most of the articles had a github link with source code. I think sharing knowledge in that way is very humbling and you might find other devs out there with crazy good skills from which you can learn a great deal. Some might contribute to your code others might have questions. Both make you think usually. While working on code I've also learned a great deal from open source projects. How they're organized, how specific problems might be solved,... Especially when you're trying to pick up a new skill looking at projects with many people working on them is a great challenge. If you're still interested in communication I might have a proposition for you :) Me and couple of devs from around the world have come together to develop the email and messaging communication platform in decentralized manner. We're not a company or seeking any investments. It's just enthusiasm fueled by our free time. Currently the project on Github is privately held, but we plan to open it up next year for everyone to use/contribute. If that is something of your interest let me know. The current tech stack is: Javascript libraries, Go Database, Go SDK, peer to peer networking using libp2p, decentralized pub/sub, AngularJS, WebSockets, GraphQL, ... Currently i'm looking into HTC Exodus 1 phone to check their Zion wallet.

Hi everyone I'm Igor Rendulic and me and a few other enthusiasts are working on a first decentralized email https://mail.io Lately I've devoted myself to data privacy, data ownership and decentralization. I'm currently working on a decentralized database with high availability, consistency, reliability and causality mechanisms. My passions are observing open source communities coming together to build something better. I also love building simple small tools for developers to reuse. My tech stack: Appengine Flex, Standard, Kubernetes, AngularJS, Node, Tensorflow, Keras, ...

I agree that big companies probably won't find a place in decentralized world. Depends whats "big" Saying that there are some smaller companies/organizations with nifty products out there. If there is a niche not occupied by conglomerates, I hope that opens opportunities for smaller players. P2P Hopefully in near future traffic obscuring techniques will evolve to the point where one could setup nodes even inside Australia. Todays example is Tor browser with Onion routing. Onion routing has its problems though (governments host their own server to monitor/serve traffic). The tech is not there yet but a lot of effort is pouring into "political" decentralization right now with projects such as Ethereum Whisper (dark routing). But yes, it is still early for tech in this case. Agreed. TLS is not the way to go. Crypto Wallets for example create public/private key pairs locally. No need for intermediary. Example are end-to-end encrypted services. Communication is more than possible today. The world will change in my humble opinion. HTC just released a phone with Zion Wallet. It's moving. Slowly. But it is moving. I'm naturally optimistic :) Or, like you said, maybe some will just stop doing business with Australia :)

I wouldn't be too worried about it. Software can and will become decentralized in a sense of owning your data regardless of its location. P2P networks are popping up. Encryption keys are more and more being held on the side of the user, not on a central server or company server. It's just a matter of time banning or colluding with companies won't be a feasible solution anymore (e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/17/17246150/telegram-russia-ban ).

Is interoperability needed or vendor lock-in OK? (PaaS, Vendor Pub/Sub vs Kafka, ...) Do microservices come in handy and what scalability will the platform have NoSQL vs SQL (scalability of the data) Hard to tell. Decisions go case by case.

I've done so many small projects in Starbucks. 1G optic line, perfect for machine learning big data sets when download is needed.