Been in web development for over 23 years now. I truthfully started back in 1995 but didn't land my first real job until 1999. I am now 43 years old.
I remember back when a website/application was a basic HTML page with some simple Javascript that had a Perl/CGI backend and perhaps coupled to a Postgres database. My skills in Corel Photopaint allowed me to create some swanky UI graphics and I was quite proud of my accomplishments.
As technology changed, I adapted and learned VBScript, MSAccess, ASP 3 and PHP. PHP actually chaaged my creativity as I found the Unix-based servers a lot more customizable as I built my solutions. I did work in Perl for some time but Perl wasn't apparently progressive enough and was getting uber-bloated.
Many years into the industry, I have worked with PHP using Zend, CodeIgniter, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and many other web frameworks.
I no longer write in PHP, I am a Senior NodeJS developer. But with my experience in the past with PHP and frameworks, I learned a "beast" of a toolkit called Drupal. Drupal was a massive crowd-sourced toolkit that developers can use to build websites and web applications. It had no "easy" button but a huge community of support and massive adoption. I want to highlight that despite the pros of the community around it, the platform was ridiculously over-complex and "not fun" to build with.
We are now in 2018. The era of Dev-ops, automation, AI, Machine Learning, serverless architecture and other swanky terms that intend to change the compute world. Since my PHP days, I have learned several more languages such as Python, NodeJS and most of the abstractions on top of web development like SASS, LESS, TypeScript and so on.
I had a recent stent with Google Cloud for about six months and learnt a lot about their "toolkit" and cloud capabilities. I built an entire workflow system in that environment and was very happy that I still had "the chops" to learn something new.
I have actually been using AWS for about 8 years now but never very seriously. A few EC2 instances, perhaps an S3 bucket, a VPC and maybe an RDS instance or two. The more AWS is evolving, I am starting to see AWS as the new Drupal; another giant toolkit of somewhat interconnected parts that "I have to learn to piece together". Fuck that! I graduated past those pains a long time ago and realized that I don't want a swiss-army knife of "someone else's computers and technology" when I can do what I need without AWS!
Problem is that companies have a motivation to downsize IT, and they think that they will save money when they become "cloudified". They don't realize that the cloud is really just someone else's computers; we still have to secure them and maintain the integrity of their environments. We just transfer IT time/money to software development and start calling ourselves DevOps and get no more pay for the extra work we do. The company actually loses more people than money for this ignorance.
Money is also lost though. It took our software team about two years to fully understand how to manage cost with Google and AWS when deploying software out there. We spent/lost about $10k per month as we learned how those platforms worked. We had to play with so many different tools like Redshift, RDS, EC2 and Lambda to determine the most cost efficient means to run our cloud apps. Yeah, we all now know what the "best" way is do accomplish our financial gosas but we lost a great deal of capital learning this new "Drupal" while "Drupal" profited with all of ignorance and mistakes.
Done with cloud, too much, too complex, not interested. I just want to program solutions, not invent over-complex architectures and learn cost management strategies of AWS, Google and Azure.
No comments:
Post a Comment