The DevDiscuss Podcast begins with an interview and ends with commentary from listeners — and we like to feature the actual voices from our communi...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
What is the biggest change in software that affected my work?
5 years ago, I would have said: we finally take usability seriously.
Today I say we are now taking seriously usability for ourselves, for the developer tools.
There is a macho culture where people love complex software, like VI or even GIT in its advanced usages.
It's complex?... No... It's powerful they say, WE are power users... but maybe you are too stupid to read the fucking manual.
I say it's even better when you don't impose the complexity on your users.
Developers too are users.
Developers too can be easily distracted from the business task they have at hand and get stuck in a rabbit hole,
with obscure configuration formats, or a cryptic error messages.
There is no silver bullet in software development,
but there are lot of opportunities to make things 1% better.
Help to prevent common mistakes.
Write clear error messages that point to a solution.
Use more empathy when you write documentation.
Those things matter.
At the end of the day we are users too and we deserve better developer tools.
This is often the result of bad documentation or the lack of short, concise examples. If your documentation reads like an abstract math book, that I am not interested in using your software.
Thanks, @jmfayard ! Any chance you'd be interested in calling in to record this message? It only takes a minute 😊 If so, the instructions are listed above. Thanks!
Done :)
I think the biggest change has been the maturation of the bootcamp space. I was not a part of bootcamps but they were just becoming a thing when I was earlier in my career. I feel now that that has normalized, it's really broadened the landscape of the software industry in ways that may not directly affect me as a more experienced developer but really have changed the way the whole industry conducts its business.
We have a long way to go, but it's very different in mostly good ways compared to when I started.
Sites like Netlify & Vercel brought the hosting game to a new level. It's never been easier to hosting applications within seconds allowing me to test new things and push new apps regularly and without hassle.
Mine has to be the change in provisioning infrastructure, databases and web hosting. It's generally cloud based.
Thanks, @bernardbaker ! Any chance you'd be interested in calling in to record this comment or a similar one? It's a super quick process! Instructions above!
Sure.
Darn! I missed the cut-off for calling in. Apologies @graciegregory .
Native Web Components make working on the frontend fun again. Many of the frontend technologies and those in v8, including recently via Deno, reduce the disparities between implementations and shift away from large external dependencies to simply working directly in the runtime. Things that come to mind that make life easier: template literals, Intl, Custom Elements, Proxy, URL, etc.
Free static hosting site and Firebase. Now I have more chance to showcase my work without worrying about cost. Free tier is gorgeous enough for hobbies and quick work. I don't have to pay for hosting just to host my customized website.
It's really interesting for me that literally every comment here talks about "positive" things.
One of the most negative changes is that literally every company nowadays tracks everything the user does. Sure, this data can be valuable for some insights. But ultimately this tracked data goes either into Scrooge McDuck's safe (it's an asset) or it gets directly sold (you use Google Analytics, so Google now owns your tracked data too).
How has it affected my work? For me, this leads to the fact that I nowadays morally devalue many companies. Because as an employee you have to add this stuff into your code, although you know how bad/shady many companies handle it (e.g. hiding it in 100 sites of TOS). In the long run, this leads to an internet that is controlled by huge companies. 80% of the Browser market is controlled by Google. 80% of the Search Market is controlled by Google. 80% of the whole Internet Infrastructure is controlled by AWS, Google, Microsoft.
And if I don't want to participate, literally 99% of companies are not for me.
Totally hear this. I'd love to hear this as a recording if you'd be interested in submitting a voice memo. Thanks for writing in!
Hey Gracie,
thanks for reaching out,
unfortunately I have read your answer just now.
I will definitely have a look at your episode!
The high / fast development of micro-services. The concept is quite old but has recently started to be very mainstream and used heavily (netflix for example). This has led to the creation of many tools that are really easy to deploy. It has also led to the creation of many cloud services which are only pay as you go.
This led to the creation of many small internal tools that we can reuse with various clients and allowed us to give tailored services. For instance we have a easily deploy-able status system.
The biggest change in software I've experienced over my career has been in the meaning I find in it, rather than a change in the technology that powers it. The perspectives of those who dream and develop software give it substance, and when when we look, or feel, or hear through it and pull a switch — then it has meaning. Today software is a lens of incalculable scale, and the more humans and switches we add — the more it focuses on diversifying the perspectives that shape it. And that is the meaning I find today in software, more so than ever before.
Definitely public cloud services. While we had already started with cloud services earlier than 5 years ago, this space has evolved quite a bit.
There is a lot more around provisioning infrastructure through software and also taking advantage of various managed services that make a bunch of things easier - but also introduces new types of challenges.
JavaScript really become the star of all languages and it becomes really matured with ES6, ES7, ESNext, and with Nodejs you can use javaScript even in Backend development also. It makes it a superpower.
I started my career as a PHP developer, but with the trend of separation of concerns for the front end, the backend, and DevOps, the scenario really gets changed. Also, Front End Development doesn't limit to creating HTML and CSS markup from a PSD file. It has grown to Components based development.
For Components based development, we use Reactjs, Vuejs (the javascript libraries for front end development), and as they use their own template like JSX (which JS engine don't understand) and to make it understandable we use Babel and so on.. (Webpack) and developer with new skill set requirement raised.
For personal projects, things like netlify and heroku - for work stuff - not really new but transformative to me has been embracing TDD and a test focussed approach to development - slowed me down to start with but long term it’s way quicker to prevent as many bugs as poss rather than finding them in prod!
Move to cloud. It was inevitable that one project will require deployment to any of these
providers and then more and more will follow. Also CI has a good name now, before I just called it administration, I made some bash scripts and used Jenkins to automate some stuff on Linux server. I'm waiting for a project to start forcing me to use ML or AI which I successfully avoided. Not that I hate it but not all projects actually need it.
There were many things that affected my work, but the most one was me realizing that I need to stop racing every new technology and to focus more on concepts, principles, and ideas. Not like it's not important to learn new stuff but trying to learn every new technology can sometimes be distracting from excelling in the technologies or languages you know.
I still try to keep myself cultured with the new technologies, and I learn new ones from time to time in a way that's enough for me to know about them, and when I need one I can then learn more about it.
I think the prominent change in the past 5 years is the maturity and complexity of security of softwares as it has been now more easy to implement and to tackle exploits, no doubt new methods of exploitation are here but we made it this far improving and securing softwares, so we will eventually going to pass this exploitable borderline as well
I'm going to stray from dev tools with my answer and mention Figma. As someone who works cross-functional between design and engineering, I've always championed for transforming teams into collaborative units and minimizing handoffs however possible. Before tools like Figma, the only time design and engineering worked together was during early whiteboard sessions and of course the design handoff. Figma however, provides an interesting solution. Its live collaboration and URL-based sharing allows different teams to jump into files at a moment's notice to iterate together and create solutions at a much faster pace. I've recognized increased enthusiasm from both engineering and design teams using Figma. Presentations are far less frequent and the team dynamic grows to become more fluid. Anything we can do to eliminate the fences that separate our disciplines only helps foster better products and better teams.
There are two things I noticed: on one hand, some frameworks become more mature by having a record of years of industry usage to show for, on the other hand the tools available become more diverse which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but it increases the barrier of entrance for people that are trying to get a foothold in the world of software development.
That one is easy for me: cross platform developer ecosystem, starting w/ Microsoft dotnet framework which allows me to use less resources on the server with even more workload and not only that, visual studio code (which is cross platform too) allows me to work w/ my code very easily and faster, I write some code in the morning in my PC, resume work afternoon in my MacBook Air, compile in Mac and upload the binaries to a windows server, that was unimaginable five years ago.
To me that's propably the advent of ES6, which kicked of Javascripts rapid evolution and made modern frameworks possible in the first place.
Thanks for this comment! If you're interested in leaving a voice recording also, we'd love to hear it 😉
Git, Docker, CI/CD
If you told my 2015 self that my 2020 everyday code editor for Ruby and JS would be a product from Microsoft, that person would be very surprised and probably dismissive.
Python is used widely in a lot of things from education, data science, web development and devops
For me its moving to a Microfront end architecture with Webpack 5 and module federation
Hey Karen! We'd love to hear a voice recording of this comment if you're interested. Simple and quick instructions above. Either way, thanks for sharing your thoughts on this prompt!
Serverless