The Modern Age

All industries can point to different eras as practices, techniques and perceived wisdom undergo constant evolution.

Many would point to technological industries as taking this to extremes with the pace of change often deemed to be frightening.

While I think this aspect of the industry is often over exaggerated it is undeniable for such a comparatively young discipline software engineering has evolved and changed many times.

If this is true then what defines this modern era of software development?

Continually Under Attack

There has been a proliferation of the use of technology such that it influences every part of modern life, along with this ever increasing use of technology has come an ever greater understanding of how to harness it.

Never have so many people known enough to be dangerous.

Whilst IT security has always been a concern its importance in any modern day system is now such that it is negligent in the extreme for it not to be given focus.

Expose any piece of technology to the internet and you may be shocked at the speed at which it will start to be probed and investigated. These attempts won't always be malicious but many will be looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities that may lead to a bounty.

An entire industry now exists solely to facilitate these attacks, newly found exploits being shared in kit form to allow anyone with even the most minimal computing skills to be a potential threat.

In the modern day it pays to be paranoid, everyone is out to get you.

Cloudy Days Ahead

The workhorses of an internet driven world are servers, everything can eventually be traced back to these pieces of tin.

An appreciation for the building and maintenance of these boxes used to be a primary skill for someone wishing to deploy software to them.

The advent of the cloud has removed that requirement, in the modern day only suckers build servers.

The arrival of the cloud should lead us all to a mindset that its a waste of a valuable and talented resource to have engineers working on already solved problems.

By using the services offered by the cloud, whether this be PaaS, SaaS or IaaS, we can ensure we concentrate on the areas where we can add value. How much value are we really able to add to building infrastructure others have already mastered?

The days of developers having to worry about problems with the JVM, disk IO or registry settings should be very much over.

Although our industry is young we should look to take advantages of the areas of maturity we do have and not think our wheel can be better than the ones already invented.

Always be Deploying

Traditionally we operated in a world of releases cycles, set points in time when we released software.

This cadence brought with it a gradual rise in tension culminating in a stressful pushing of the button to deploy to production.

Thankfully we have learnt from these scars and developed technology to ease the process of delivery, this combined with the emergence of the cloud has made our release strategy must simpler, in the modern world when software is ready we ship it.

The drive to develop this technology wasn't a war on complexity it was a war on fear.

Fear comes from uncertainty and what we have come to realise is human processes foster that uncertainty. The monotony of automation applying unrelenting consistency takes away that fear and allows us to manoeuvre ourselves to a position where deployment is a consequence of work being completed not a conscious and fearful action.

Someone may well look back on this post in years to come and think it quaint thinking I'm describing advances that themselves have been superseded. But hopefully we are still following a strategy that the best way to deliver technology is with technology.

Problems and threats may change and we have to adapt our practices to suit but ultimately our core skill set is technological, we are experts in it and therefore it is probably the root to a solution to our current set of problems.