Why are new startups growing so fast? Why is the wage distribution getting larger for software engineers? Why do I love infrastructure? Is open source dead?
I think a lot of these things, and some more things, all have their roots in a big shift in how we build software. Or rather, how we buy software. Software development today is a lot about using the right vendors rather than building technology yourself.
Software infrastructure (by which I include everything ending with *aaS, or anything remotely similar to it) is an exciting field, in particular because (despite what the neo-luddites may say) it keeps getting better every year! I love working with something that moves so quickly.
It’s a popular attitude among developers to rant about our tools and how broken things are. Maybe I’m an optimistic person, because my viewpoint is the complete opposite! I had my first job as a software engineer in 1999, and in the last two decades I’ve seen software engineering changing in ways that have made us orders of magnitude more productive. Just some examples from things I’ve worked on or close to: