The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

I had this vision 5 years ago, for sort of an operating system for social apps. Where a regular user could build their own app by just installing some plugins, dropping a chatroom and some other components on a page, paying a developer to wire them up, and paying a designer to design the theme. And there would be a marketplace of components built by more experienced developers.

So 5 years ago I started my first open source platform, http://phponpie.com

Since then it's come a long way, and it turned into a real platform: http://platform.qbix.com

Like mobile apps, social apps require an operating system that solves common problems in a standard way:

  * User signup and secure auth, login
  * Should work with emails, mobile #, facebook
  * Accessible from desktop, tablets, mobile
  * Contacts integration / friendlists
  * Real time collaboration from any device
  * Offline notifications via fb, sms, app notifications etc.
  * Access control and privacy - as expressive as possible
  * Native apps on iPhone and iOS via Cordova
  * Invitations and one-click account creation
  * Encourage best practices for scaling, web standards etc.
  * Installer to upgrade apps and plugin versions cleanly

etc etc.

All that stuff should have standard solutions which you can override. The apps and plugins should all interoperate.

And finally, since I really care about decentralization, it would be cool if this whole operating system could be as decentralized as Wordpress is for blogs, as opposed to say facebook. That would also solve all the scaling problems that facebook and other centralized social networks have.

That last part - decentralizing the social network - took the most effort, as I had to solve problems of security, identity, privacy, as well as app and plugin versioning and signing across a distributed network. Just like iOS is for mobile apps, and Bitcoin is for distributed contract apps, the Q Platform is if you want a social layer for your app, from user accounts to everything else, without having to write it from scratch.

Yeah, so that's what I built. Link to the open source: http://github.com/EGreg/Q

That's a bit optimistic. Their sales team alone is bigger than that. Companies aren't just engineers.

Less overhead, more productive, yet still the same pay...

This has always been the case. Software people in the 70s and 80s already had the distinction between "systems" and "application" programmers -- the former understood to be concerned with making the pipes and plumbing, vs. the applications guys concerned with the end users. Applications have always been like legos.

I work as a systems developer but often do consulting projects as an application developer, and it's a totally different mindset. Writing software for end users, I rarely even remotely think about CS, algorithms, pointers, recursion, numerical stability, memory allocators, etc, whereas I do care intimately about the tools I'm using, much like I suspect a carpenter cares about what drill he's got. On the other end of the spectrum, I can hardly go a day writing traditional "systems" software without considering things like what data structure MongoDB/Postgres uses to hold indices, and gigantic, complex consensus problems (distributed systems, e.g. how DNS behaves).

I hope we start to treat these two endeavors differently because they require totally different mindsets and education. A typical app developer need know no more about how OSes work, than a plumber needs to understand the metallurgy used to make pipes.

It seems this claim has been made forever. COBOL was supposed to make programmers unnecessary. So were rules engines. And code generators and an endless list of other technologies.