For any audience, recommended as a keynote presentation.
As the mid-decade mark passed in the 2010s, the software development industry felt itself cross a threshold, but wasn't quite sure what that threshold was. It was clear that traditional Web applications--server-side generated HTML sent back to a browser running on some kind of device--wasn't really "cutting it", not with all the different native mobile applications that need access to the same back-end systems that the web applications had. (And the native mobile applications were a necessity because, let's face it, "mobile Web" is something of a joke.) At first, it felt like all we really needed to do was build "APIs". But as developers tried to do that, barriers kept looming. Issues keep cropping up. Microservices. REST. Containers. Docker. The list of acronyms kept growing and growing, and no end was in sight. And the reasong for that is pretty simple: We keep focusing on the wrong things. We want to build something different, and yet, something very much similar to what we've always built. We want to build platforms.
Published on 25 April 2024