Software has come a long way. The early ones were written in a single language of choice and mostly “homegrown” where everything was usually from one company (e.g. Microsoft). Fast forward now, the modern software stack is drastically different. Not only is it written in multiple languages, a lot of it is now “plug and play” style with either open source or commercial frameworks — similar to the different components in the circuit board. If you want to use them, just sign up for a key, install the framework, instantiate with a single call and voila !

Whether its analytics, crash logs, performance metrics, etc or whether it is more sophisticated but easy to use frameworks like AngularJS, “stack” of the future will resemble more like the circuit board — where a Software Architect will have a predetermined “blueprint” of all the components required and it will be a matter of picking from the various popular offerings out there. It won’t make dollar sense to custom create them at all. Even at a more granular level, open source projects like those available on github provide tons of quality boiler plate code to jumpstart projects.

The exciting thing about this is that it will allow for developers to laser focus on the core business problem — that is, how to solve a business need, as opposed to being caught up in several of the auxiliary issues like logging, performance metrics etc.

But it also brings in the challenge of picking the right offering available. The responsibility for this lies with the Software Architect. Not only will the individual need the regular skills required by an architect today, but will also have to expand the knowledge of what is out there to efficiently design a system.