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Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#21

Post by mabbo »

Some people don't like the word much, but "serverless" is going to become a bigger deal.

You'll write your code, complex or simple; you'll hand it off to some cloud system; you'll write a bit of configuration; you're done. Likely the configuration part will become less and less required.

You won't think about hardware, scaling, load balancing, etc, it will just happen for you. The data store being used will be abstracted away so that you don't know/care much about who provides it. Configuration problem.

Containers, AWS Lambda, these are just the first course of this meal.

Why? Because developers are expensive. Time spent doing anything other than the critical piece of writing business logic code is time wasted, and longer time to market.

That's how I see the future of the server side.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#22

Post by andoma »

i336_ wrote: post #16

> Apparently, WebAssembly will revolutionize the client-side development. The web apps will be very much like desktop ones: high performing, can be written in any language. I unfortunately don't have the specifics myself, but this would be the perfect point for someone else to chime in about DOM manipulation speed and the other various sources of browser overhead. I know they're nonzero myself. WebAssembly won't turn…

Might be worth to clarify that WebRTC encapsulates the SCTP data streams in DTLS which is just normal UDP packets. So there are no "real" SCTP packets on the network as a result of WebRTC.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#23

Post by i336_ »

andoma wrote: post #22
i336_ wrote: post #16

> Apparently, WebAssembly will revolutionize the client-side development. The web apps will be very much like desktop ones: high performing, can be written in any language. I unfortunately don't have the specifics myself, but this would be the perfect point for someone else to chime in about DOM manipulation speed and the other various sources of browser overhead. I know they're nonzero myself. WebAssembly won't turn…

Might be worth to clarify that WebRTC encapsulates the SCTP data streams in DTLS which is just normal UDP packets. So there are no "real" SCTP packets on the network as a result of WebRTC.

Oh.

Thanks. Fixed!

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#24

Post by digitalarborist »

mrweasel wrote: post #9

The ability to build a solid backend platform and infrastructure is going to be increasingly important in the future. The "backend" is becoming increasingly anonymous (as in not seen, not as in privacy), but it has never been more important. If nothing else the increasing focus on data collection and processing will push the need for custom backend forward for many years. Any every application that needs to store or…

I don't think custom backends are going away either, I do think it will become way less prevalent then it is today though, similarly how all programs used to do manual memory management, this hasn't gone away but most programmers now rely on garbage collection.

So much of backend work is redundant, login, user info management, allowing the creation of groups of users, user following, user data uploading or sharing. Not to mention all the DevOps, managing CloudFormation scripts, VPCs, proxies, load balancing, dns, ssl, cdn, database schema, the list goes on, and that's before there has been any original development at all.

With react native and electron (I haven't found the atom browser or vs code weirdly restricted) the web stack is moving into desktop territory and with serverless frameworks becoming more prevelent hopefully this will make writing original software easier with less redundant work.

As to your point about data processing needing a custom backend, I see the exact opposite. Generally all this data is just funneled into a generic hadoop cluster and can be manipulated any which way from there using spark or any number of data analysis tools.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#27

Post by sotojuan »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #13

My hope is it will get a lot simpler, even trivial work seems far more complex that it needs to be. I'm pretty sure I was more productive writing VB apps twenty years ago than I am with current web development.

Yep, I hope for the same but I don't think it'll happen :-(

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#29

Post by tinganho »

I think the future of back-end development is heavily decided by the future programming language. I think we are still missing a programming language that is safe, fast and productive. Safe meaning type safe and memory safe(Also memory leak safe), Fast meaning near zero abstraction costs, and productive meaning productive syntax and good tooling support. And it has to be built on modern compiler architecture, which means a compiler exposes an API for tooling(symbol lookup, refactoring, etc.), so people around the world don't need to reinvent the wheel.

I personally don't think any programming language fits the above description. And we have yet to invent it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the future of back-end development?

#30

Post by tzakrajs »

I had this long rant, then I deleted it because I realized I misunderstood you. Another attempt: The vast majority of compute will live in the datacenter for the next 30 years bc quantum computers require superconductivity.

That compute will become like a common utility and will most certainly be used to power the APIs that consumer electronics call. The P2P adds unnecessary complexity when client/server, a simpler solution, works well to bootstrap an application from a trusted source without the need for homomorphic encryption or other exotic schemes.

Bandwidth, compute and storage will continue to increase faster in the center than our consumer electronics on the edge. The backbones, internet exhanges and datacenters are where density equals economy of scale.

And webframeworks will come and go without a revolution, just another leaf in the wind.

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