Building blocks for Software Developers

Have you noticed how many super powers you actually posses?

I remember a conversation I had with a relative around 15 years ago, when I was getting seriously into programming.

He was trying to put into perspective, the difference between programming back when he did it, and at the time when I was starting, explaining that when he started programming it was so primitive and they literally spent hours and hours troubleshooting code that did not run, only to discover they were missing a semi colon.

He argued that today (around year Y2K) it is much easier, since the tools find trivial problems in no time and let you focus on the bigger picture of the program you’re writing.

Fast forward another 15 years — today — what has happened, and how does it compare?

I’m not sure the tools to actually write code has gotten a lot better. Of course they improve, but looking at the big picture and comparing to 1990 it is not exponential improvements.

But the tools we have available outside our code editor — 3rd party services and APIs that we can easily tap into and enrich our own software is a big deal!

I mean really big.

You literally have super powers, if you can code and knows how to use modern technology and APIs.

Regardless if you’re pro Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform — you have availability of cloud scale hardware to power whatever app you want to build.

You can scale as you go along, which means you can start out pretty easily with small instances of compute power for a very small price and easily scale up when you get more customers and more revenue.

Need a payment gateway? It’s just a couple of copy-paste’s away.

How about an API for getting recent satellite imagery of a given location? Weather forecast or historical weather data for the same location?

It’s just an API integration away — an endless supply of LEGO bricks — actually not bricks, but entire building sets.

It’s no less than super powers.

And the best thing is, that all these possibilities has been provided by people just like you and me, who cared enough about a problem to make it their life’s work to solve, so that you and I can make even better things, much much easier than ever before.