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Building for the 99% Developers

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Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#191

Post by urthor »

juliendorra wrote: post #179
mro_name wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you don't believe accountants care about anything but the market leader, do you?

Microsoft wasn’t the clear market leader in the 70s and 80s. Look for example at the spreadsheet. Multiplan was loosing against Lotus 123. (123 being the VisiCalc killer itself) Microsoft first launched Multiplan as its spreadsheet software on Macintosh (1984), it was something like the 22th or 23rd port of Multiplan! Then in 1985 very first version of Excel (Macintosh only) It was an incredible step up from text-scr…

Out of curiosity, why did Macintosh fall behind in the late 80s?

Why didn't they charge ahead and achieve dominance in the 90s?

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#192

Post by ejb999 »

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…

>>So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer.

I didn't read the article the same way as many here did - my take was that he was talking about the 99% of developers who don't need the newest/leading-edge technologies because they are not solving for those problems (massive scaling for example), because the business they are working with/for simply will never need to worrying about that.

I didn't take it to mean that some of those same developers solving those '99%' problems, are not individually top 1% developers - you can be a top 1% developer imo, and still used tried-and-tested technology that is consider 'old' or boring.

Using the right tools, does not make one a top 1% developer; a top 1% developer will shine no matter what tools that need to use; they just use them better.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#193

Post by urthor »

pjmlp wrote: post #169
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…

A good way to dive into this is to do consulting for non tech industries, where 100% of IT is a cost center, no matter what.

"I did my job well, everything was running smoothly."

Too smoothly. We got 20% layoffs for doing a good job! Cost savings.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#194

Post by Lio »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #29
amw-zero wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a solved problem? The most difficult to navigate and extended codebase I ever saw was a medium-to-large sized Rails codebase.

Because Rails doesn't encourage modularization. It's fine at small sized codebases but eventually you want to "package by feature" (to borrow a Java term) rather than by layer.

Out of the box rails provides Modules, Concerns, Engines and Gems as mechanisms to package by feature.

If you want to back that up with static types Ruby > 3.0 provides that out of the box too.

What is it you think it's lacking?

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#195

Post by zozbot234 »

emrahsamdan wrote: post #190
zozbot234 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CGI was the first Serverless technology. Then PHP did it even better.

Serverless as a term mixed up with FaaS. In 2022, Serverless is more general as it can be defined anything that autoscales to infinity and scales to zero when not used and pay per use. Amazon DynamoDB is also serverless in that sense for example.

> anything that autoscales to infinity and scales to zero when not used and pay per use

Ah, you mean grid/utility computing. But as you point out that's broader than FaaS.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#197

Post by zozbot234 »

urthor wrote: post #191
juliendorra wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft wasn’t the clear market leader in the 70s and 80s. Look for example at the spreadsheet. Multiplan was loosing against Lotus 123. (123 being the VisiCalc killer itself) Microsoft first launched Multiplan as its spreadsheet software on Macintosh (1984), it was something like the 22th or 23rd port of Multiplan! Then in 1985 very first version of Excel (Macintosh only) It was an incredible step up from text-scr…

Out of curiosity, why did Macintosh fall behind in the late 80s? Why didn't they charge ahead and achieve dominance in the 90s?

They didn't fall behind all that much, they were just too expensive. The PC platform used to be expensive too, but then became quite a bit cheaper in the 1990s.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#198

Post by emrahsamdan »

cebert wrote: post #185

I believe Serverless technologies are a game changer for the 99%. I work at a firm that could be considered part of the 99%. We build mission critical apps, but don’t have entire teams dedicated to building platforms or managing Kubernetes. Most of our talent is average compared to FAANG. We don’t have SREs or developer advocates, but we do have customers who rely on our software for life and death situations. Server…

There are thousands, if not millions, of developers, now using serverless to build real-life customer-facing applications. As in the whole new tech, it gets adopted for non mission critical apps first between 2016-2018. Starting with 2019, more and more companies adopted the technology and the Cloud providers, especially AWS, invested heavily to improve the integrations and remove the roadblockers. See how Lego has moved the whole e-commerce app into serverless. https://medium.com/lego-engineering/accelerating-with-server...

I also strongly believe that severless is an overloaded term and everyone understands something different from it. Some people consider this only as a FaaS but I think that it's any cloud service, that can auto-scale to infinity, scales to zero, pay-per-use and managed. I frankly believe Serverless should be regarded as a paradigm rather than a technology advancement. here's a very nice blog about it: https://ben11kehoe.medium.com/serverless-is-a-state-of-mind-...

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#199

Post by [deleted] »

ignoramous wrote: post #184
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…

Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pipelines up above: they only parse about 99% correctly, which is fine for your idiotic comments about YouTube videos, but pretty nasty when you mangle critical business data. And when the business dudes get involved, they'd rather do anything than mangle their cr…

[deleted]

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#200

Post by _448 »

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…

Steve Ballmer talk at the Oxford Union related to this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMb_4OBgWIY
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