Programming: easier, better, faster, stronger.
This is the world we will live in, so prepare to be amazed.
“The potential impact of the lone software engineer is soaring. How long before we have a billion-dollar acquisition offer for a one-engineer startup?”
This is according to Sam Gerstenzang from A16Z who says we are moving towards a world where building software will be accessible to everyone; and it’s a shift I strongly believe in. As a matter of fact, Sam continues,
“looking at the most recent exits, fewer engineers and dollars are needed to ship code to more users than ever before. Whatsapp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired. Imgur scaled to over 40 billion monthly image views with just 7 engineers. Instagram had 30 million users and just 13 engineers when it was acquired for a billion dollars.”
Today small teams can have big impact because software development has improved dramatically; think about startups like Stripe which created simple APIs that abstract away complex back-ends, or how infrastructure and hosting can be set up in minutes and with costs close to zero.
One day it will be considered funny that building Facebook required so much hard work. Building applications is going to be like snapping pieces together as is they were building blocks. We’re moving toward software as Legos. Building software will become a visual experience using natural language.
Everybody in the tech industry seems to be trying to make programming easier to pick up, but most of the efforts and improvements “only” made programmers more productive instead of opening door to people who haven’t a lot of knowledge about what coding is really about.
A fundamental step behind this shift is the fact that programming and coding should be two different things. Programming means having a clear understanding of what an app does. This includes understanding what the flow of actions is like “when the user does X, and Y is true, then do Z” or in real-world words “when the user signs up, send him a welcome email”. Coding, on the other hand, is about coding! It’s about translating and writing in a way computer understands.
The evolution of technology is about transforming markets and becoming more accessible to a broader audience. Today code is the only thing that hasn’t followed that trend yet, is still about typing some structured text. This is an issue as code is the number one bottleneck when people try to build software and more generally technology.
It has to change.
For those who think this is crazy just look back at the early days when people were programming computers by taking full control of the motherboard. Who would have thought that someone could build software just relying on a mouse or the screen and not worrying about each component of the chip anymore? It must have sounded crazy but it happened.
A bit later the above mentioned days MS-DOS was the way to send commands to your computer, then Microsoft Windows was introduced and no one worried what to type in a command line anymore.
This general trend has enabled an easier, faster and wider use of technology; as also Chris Dixon (@cdixon) stated in his post:
“in all likelihood, the demand for software development will
continue to dramatically outpace the supply”
then, building software will be like using software. A beautiful user experience. Higher level of abstraction appeared over time, making programming way easier and faster.
The industry is going in two directions on the way to make simpler for people to build new stuff. On one hand, there is teaching how to code, on the other hand, tools that make technology creation more accessible. Code Academy, General Assembly, code.org are following the first path.
I love them, but I think people want to solve problems much more than learning how to code.
Software is the only force that can drive the ability to write software to solve problems. “Software is not only eating the world, is eating software development” — said Chris Dixon. In other words this means decoupling the ability to solve problems from the know-how needed to write software. What will happen is an unprecedented improvement for problem solvers and business builders. Even if it seems harder at first, it might actually have higher chances of success in the long run.
I think about the winners of TC Disrupt of this year. The Boston-based Alfred, a service layer on the shared economy that manages your routine across multiple on-demand and local services (like Handybook, Instacart, and the local dry cleaner).
Startups creating services on top of existing others is just a matter of orchestrating APIs and it’s definitively not that far away the day when it will be possible to build an app like without engineers at all.
It is only a matter of time. A new breed of tools are coming to bring this revolution, empowering a normal person to be able to make a site that’s as complex as a Kickstarter. At Stamplay we’re lowering the barrier of entrance to programming by redesigning it with a Lego-like approach. Eve will launch an Excel-like tool in early 2015 to empower non-coders to build apps. Bubble is trying to do this with a visual drag and drop tool.
This is incredibly powerful and the gains of such change will be unbelievable. Opening application- or startup-creation to different people with little or no technical background will empower them to launch their ideas, unleashing new categories of startups, from builders with new backgrounds and perspectives.
People will learn how to program and not how to code instead.
People will be empowered to create faster.
People will focus on solving the hard problems without wasting time with the plumbing.
People will unleash thousands of new startups because this friction will be gone.
This is the world we will live in, so prepare to be amazed.
