4 ms·

Steve is not alone in his line of thinking. If you've experienced something better than what exists today you constantly question why the industry hasn't come t

by asim 6y ago

Steve is not alone in his line of thinking. If you've experienced something better than what exists today you constantly question why the industry hasn't come to the sam realisation. It took Apple to really say, hey this is where mobile is going, here's the iPhone, nothing else matters. I think right now we're in the pre iPhone era where we're still hand crafting this stuff. Certain developer experiences are drastically improving. The frontend (as fast as it moves) now has the likes of Netlify and Vercel. It's about saying, we just need to focus on frontend so give me the solution to that. I think backend is the same but it also highlights that there's no defacto standard for backend development in the cloud. When that's finally realised we'll see solutions that cut away all the non-essentials. Someone mentioned Heroku and one click spin-up of dependencies. Great, be everything to everyone, that's why Heroku is barely successful. Anything that was ever compelling was incredibly narrowly focused, opinionated and resonated heavily with devs. My take. Go based microservices written using gRPC and consumed as HTTP/JSON APIs. A platform that offers access to underlying primitives for building those types of services and a complete lifecycle for build, run and manage. Look at Twilio, look at Stripe, look at Segment, look at Sendgrid. These are the companies of the future built in the Cloud. For the backend, its simply about building APIs and having platforms that enable that. Which means you need auth, config, storage, pubsub, etc. Here's my piece https://github.com/micro/micro/blob/1166d15eff2015e32a9ed7932401f8d16eace438/docs/blog/_posts/2020-11-05-micro-v3-aka-m3o.md https://github.com/micro/micro/blob/1166d15eff2015e32a9ed793... Here's my effort https://m3o.com https://m3o.com

Gravityloss 6y ago
The iphone was a bigger jump in the US than elsewhere. AFAIK a big part of this was that data was expensive and slow in the US. I assume there exist lots of good solutions and technologies for many problems, they just aren't mainstream. Many times the barriers for adoption are not technological.
- asim 6y ago
  Most of the solutions to the "developer experience gap" have already been built inside massive tech companies like Google. Smaller companies have their own rendition of this. Which is to say, we have a specific stack on a specific cloud provider and we use a specific developer workflow with a specific language and framework. And because of this we're all highly productive because we don't have to think about the tooling, we don't argue over design decisions or new things and when we see limitations we start to investigate the next dependency. Pragmatically companies form opinions which differ very much to the "developers need choice" mantra of the industry itself. Choice is the enemy of productivity. Google maintained a single platform called Borg that ran self contained binaries and required you to use the Google-3; c++, java or python. Internally the majority of systems looked the same and everything was consumed with RPC apis using Stubby that's now open source as gRPC. Explicit decisions and doing less makes us all more productive. The iPhone did that for mobile. Cloud is waiting for an industry standard.
user5994461 6y ago
Heroku has very wide support, you can deploy most types of applications super easily, including python/java/ruby/go. Pretty much all languages follow a basic model of build and run, though how the build is done is variable. It's great and it's very successful. The only reason Heroku is not more widespread is because they're charging $50 per unit (roughly a CPU or a GB of memory), which makes it prohibitively expensive for most workloads.

by asim 6y ago

Gravityloss 6y ago

The iphone was a bigger jump in the US than elsewhere. AFAIK a big part of this was that data was expensive and slow in the US. I assume there exist lots of good solutions and technologies for many problems, they just aren't mainstream. Many times the barriers for adoption are not technological.

asim 6y ago
Most of the solutions to the "developer experience gap" have already been built inside massive tech companies like Google. Smaller companies have their own rendition of this. Which is to say, we have a specific stack on a specific cloud provider and we use a specific developer workflow with a specific language and framework. And because of this we're all highly productive because we don't have to think about the tooling, we don't argue over design decisions or new things and when we see limitations we start to investigate the next dependency. Pragmatically companies form opinions which differ very much to the "developers need choice" mantra of the industry itself. Choice is the enemy of productivity. Google maintained a single platform called Borg that ran self contained binaries and required you to use the Google-3; c++, java or python. Internally the majority of systems looked the same and everything was consumed with RPC apis using Stubby that's now open source as gRPC. Explicit decisions and doing less makes us all more productive. The iPhone did that for mobile. Cloud is waiting for an industry standard.

user5994461 6y ago

Heroku has very wide support, you can deploy most types of applications super easily, including python/java/ruby/go. Pretty much all languages follow a basic model of build and run, though how the build is done is variable. It's great and it's very successful. The only reason Heroku is not more widespread is because they're charging $50 per unit (roughly a CPU or a GB of memory), which makes it prohibitively expensive for most workloads.