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Building for the 99% Developers

future.a16z.com

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Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#131

Post by jl6 »

ownagefool wrote: post #119
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #108

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code…

So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. Take the POS example. You're helping real people be more efficent, and you've litterally got better things to do than be a software purist ( no offense, have same problem ). People are relying on you. Meanwhile, serving the hospitality environment where multiple devices might be ran around a restaurant…

99% programmers need to pick up stuff, carry stuff, and throw stuff. 1% programmers are like circus jugglers - the same basic thing, but taken to a breathtaking extreme. They are skilful and impressive, but the scenarios where you need them are rare.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#132

Post by Annatar »

lelanthran wrote: post #104
weq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by No-FAANG engineer, you mean someone who isnt a robot ad hawker sell out? Serverless allows anyone to be scale for minimal up-front cost and only pay for the usage they really need. So glad that FAANG attract all this rare talent so us no-FAANG engineers can make a buck.

> So by No-FAANG engineer, you mean someone who isnt a robot ad hawker sell out? Come now, is there any reason to throw those insults?

Many.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#133

Post by exdsq »

joeldo wrote: post #50
sanxiyn wrote: post #30

a16z invested to Replay, "The Time Travel Debugger for Web Development". Go read about it here https://medium.com/replay-io/launching-replay-the-time-trave... and read this again. It all makes sense.

Are you implying that a16z wants websites to be as difficult as possible to maintain that a tool like this is necessary?

Haha never thought about that but it’s a fun connection

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#134

Post by just-tom »

mro_name wrote: post #113
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #108

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code…

I think it's much more profane - Microsoft didn't understand what the real world needed, they just leveraged a monopoly (that IBM let them establish) to frame what a computer looks and feels. They shaped the world to their liking and now it looks like a match. duh.

I'd argue the opposite. All Microsoft did was understand what the world needed. Were they successful because of their great marketing or their flawless coding? No. Was Windows spread like a wildfire because it solved real world problems? Yes. Is it one of the most, if not the most, influencial software ever made? Yes, no matter how dull and incompetent people might say it is. For the accountants out there, school teachers and doctors, it was magic.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#135

Post by Joeri »

brunoborges wrote: post #117

Reminds me of a frequent problem I observe with developers and operations teams moving Java workloads to Kubernetes. They focus on scalability, but miss the whole point of how the runtime (and not exclusive to the JVM) behaves - and prefers - when given proper resources. Suddenly, you see Kubernetes clusters of 2 to 4 vCPUs VMs/Nodes and containers with limits to 1,000 milicore (or 1 vCPU), and then the team solves t…

From seeing the difficulties containerizing java application servers at my own workplace I would say the hard part is making the application server stateless without sacrificing performance. Much of the older java (EE) ecosystem seems to assume a stateful application server that scales up, instead of a stateless one that scales out.

Not that I think stateless is inherently superior, just that containerizing and scaling out sort of assumes moving state out of the application server and into redis, postgres, mongo, elastic, kafka, rabbitmq, …

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#136

Post by exdsq »

cryptica wrote: post #116

Great to see that big VCs are having these deep insights. As a developer, I've essentially had to leave the industry because all the small software companies are constantly coercing all their developers into using specific tools and processes from big tech companies and unicorn startups and I was constantly pushed towards solutions which are too bureaucratic to work efficiently in a small company setting. I was too p…

Weirdly one of the reasons I moved from development to a test engineering role is you have way more technical freedom. I can basically use whatever tool I want because there’s way less oversight as long as the job is done. Want to test a CLI? Use Go/Rust. Want to load test a website? Use Scala. Data parsing? Write a lexer in Haskell. I think I’ve used almost every language in the top 30 in production thanks to this. And it’s not even just language - need reporting? Try a new web framework. Need to store data between tests? Try a new database.

I’ve written far more fun code in a testing role than I ever could in a dev role :)

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#137

Post by sanxiyn »

joeldo wrote: post #50
sanxiyn wrote: post #30

a16z invested to Replay, "The Time Travel Debugger for Web Development". Go read about it here https://medium.com/replay-io/launching-replay-the-time-trave... and read this again. It all makes sense.

Are you implying that a16z wants websites to be as difficult as possible to maintain that a tool like this is necessary?

I would say a16z is realistic about it. From the article, "Heterogeneity is here to stay".

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#138

Post by Joeri »

urthor wrote: post #38
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #8

You'd be surprised at how fast you can create something with an SQL database, a well used backend framework (eg. Rails) and a well used frontend framework. The things big tech companies do are usually to avoid scaling problems. In particular scaling on the engineering side. The above can scale to billions on the user side if needed but 10k engineers constantly updating and messing with a traditional SQL schema doesn'…

It's also that, in the past, the capacity of our monoliths to scale was far lower. There's many apps that need say, a 100GB database in 2022. Those apps also needed 100GB database in 2007, when horizontal scaling was the hottest thing around. Nowadays however, Moore's law has steadily overtaken an order of magnitude of use cases from 2007. Maybe 1/10th of the 2007 use cases still need that kind of enormous, big tech…

Stackoverflow can and has run on a single MS SQL server instance. Modern RDBMS’s on recent hardware can handle pretty ridiculous loads.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#139

Post by Jensson »

jl6 wrote: post #131
ownagefool wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. Take the POS example. You're helping real people be more efficent, and you've litterally got better things to do than be a software purist ( no offense, have same problem ). People are relying on you. Meanwhile, serving the hospitality environment where multiple devices might be ran around a restaurant…

99% programmers need to pick up stuff, carry stuff, and throw stuff. 1% programmers are like circus jugglers - the same basic thing, but taken to a breathtaking extreme. They are skilful and impressive, but the scenarios where you need them are rare.

Those scenarios are rare if you have gotten used to what 99% can and can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing.

Of course your competitors will do the same, you can't scale up an organization of top 1% professionals, so you don't really need them to compete in the market but you do really need them to solve a lot of problems. Just that today those problems aren't being solved in most places.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#140

Post by mro_name »

just-tom wrote: post #134
mro_name wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's much more profane - Microsoft didn't understand what the real world needed, they just leveraged a monopoly (that IBM let them establish) to frame what a computer looks and feels. They shaped the world to their liking and now it looks like a match. duh.

I'd argue the opposite. All Microsoft did was understand what the world needed. Were they successful because of their great marketing or their flawless coding? No. Was Windows spread like a wildfire because it solved real world problems? Yes. Is it one of the most, if not the most, influencial software ever made? Yes, no matter how dull and incompetent people might say it is. For the accountants out there, school tea…

it was the only thing they could get. No wonder it looked magic.
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