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Reminds me of what people used to say about website builders such as dreamweaver, then about the "cloud", and more recently about "serverless". Wix and squares

by ElFitz 7y ago

Reminds me of what people used to say about website builders such as dreamweaver, then about the "cloud", and more recently about "serverless". Wix and squarespace are more than enough for many businesses' needs. AWS has blown through the roof. And more and more people discover what it feels like not to have to worry about hardware and VMs configuration. ForestAdmin is also a nice case in point, supposing you have the proper stack. Sure there will always some who need developers, and most "solutions" this far haven't been up to the task. But I definitely wouldn't bet that won't ever be more than enough for most people and use cases. For this, extensibility (via integrations and proper established languages; definitely not some absurd and ill-conceived "very friendly script language") will be key

sheeshkebab 7y ago
I don’t think the article is about “serverless” - it’s more about various BPM, RPA and similar tools and technologies that tend to popup with snake oil type marketing every a couple of years. Also serverless is arguable more complex for a business person/analyst to grasp than just telling a developer to create something they imagined.
- ElFitz 7y ago
  Serverless is to sysadmins what codeless is to web developers (front and / or back). Or serverless is to those same web developers what codeless is to business people. Edit: also, this is an analogy
  - sheeshkebab 7y ago
    Yes, analogy is similar, the gap though is much larger (even though it’s barely noticeable). I guess eventually a new gen of Excel comes out that can write code without IF, FOR loops, and function calls, but until then it’s safe to say anything writing those statements other than in code is pretty much snake oil.
    - ElFitz 7y ago
      Oh, I definitely agree with you here. If it were just as "easy", AWS, GCP or Azure would have done it by now.
    - cosmodisk 7y ago
      The problem is that IF ELSE statement or even calling some functions is easy, however most people are shit scared of it.A person of very average intelligence can do it,but most people will never dare even to try,hence the popularity of all sorts of drag&drop. Another problem is that if one isn't a developer,it is close to impossible to estimate how difficult the task could be. For instance, querying 1000 records in the database is easy but doing the same for millions of records doesn't translate into "oh, let's just do it a few more times".
raiflip 7y ago
Serverless solutions still need someone to write the code to run on the serverless platform. Serverless doesn't mean literally no servers, it just means the servers are 100% managed by the provider. For example Lambda AWS still needs a developer to upload the code for the Lambda to run.
- ElFitz 7y ago
  Yes. I know. This has been my job for the past months, and all my personal projects for the past 2 and a half years. Still, no sysadmin. As for the rest. No-code / low-code solutions don't just pass nice drawings / uml diagram to a gremlins-powered CPU. They rely (and will rely) on code behind the scenes. Analogy still stands

by ElFitz 7y ago

sheeshkebab 7y ago

I don’t think the article is about “serverless” - it’s more about various BPM, RPA and similar tools and technologies that tend to popup with snake oil type marketing every a couple of years. Also serverless is arguable more complex for a business person/analyst to grasp than just telling a developer to create something they imagined.

ElFitz 7y ago
Serverless is to sysadmins what codeless is to web developers (front and / or back). Or serverless is to those same web developers what codeless is to business people. Edit: also, this is an analogy
- sheeshkebab 7y ago
  Yes, analogy is similar, the gap though is much larger (even though it’s barely noticeable). I guess eventually a new gen of Excel comes out that can write code without IF, FOR loops, and function calls, but until then it’s safe to say anything writing those statements other than in code is pretty much snake oil.
  - ElFitz 7y ago
    Oh, I definitely agree with you here. If it were just as "easy", AWS, GCP or Azure would have done it by now.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    The problem is that IF ELSE statement or even calling some functions is easy, however most people are shit scared of it.A person of very average intelligence can do it,but most people will never dare even to try,hence the popularity of all sorts of drag&drop. Another problem is that if one isn't a developer,it is close to impossible to estimate how difficult the task could be. For instance, querying 1000 records in the database is easy but doing the same for millions of records doesn't translate into "oh, let's just do it a few more times".

raiflip 7y ago

Serverless solutions still need someone to write the code to run on the serverless platform. Serverless doesn't mean literally no servers, it just means the servers are 100% managed by the provider. For example Lambda AWS still needs a developer to upload the code for the Lambda to run.

ElFitz 7y ago
Yes. I know. This has been my job for the past months, and all my personal projects for the past 2 and a half years. Still, no sysadmin. As for the rest. No-code / low-code solutions don't just pass nice drawings / uml diagram to a gremlins-powered CPU. They rely (and will rely) on code behind the scenes. Analogy still stands