Have we reached the golden age of software development? Is it going to end soon or is it here to stay for a while?

These are some of the questions asked by not only developers, companies and everyone involved in the field, but also by random people that do not have much to do with software development. The truth is, there is no-one in the planet Earth that isn’t in a way or another affected by software development. It has been changing our lives constantly whether we notice it or not, so anything related to the end of the software development’s golden age, affects all of us.

Taking into account the rise of software development during the recent years we can fully agree that yes, we have reached the golden age of software development and we are currently living in it. “Software, as Marc Andreessen says, is eating the world. Everything we do is mediated through someone’s code -- running on a smart thermostat, a smartphone, the old familiar PC, or as a microservice in an ever-expanding cloud,” writes Simon Bisson for InfoWorld.

Node.js, Docker, Apache, Jenkins, Eclipse PHP, Visual studio, etc are only a few tools that have been in the center of attention lately. ‘Even the infrastructure on which all this runs has become software defined. IaaS has become the foundation of the modern application platform, with containers becoming a key deployment mechanism. Tools like Jenkins automate build and test processes, and they increasingly integrate with familiar IDEs,” according to Bisson.

“Existing build tooling is also being extended to support these scenarios, as well as offering cross-platform builds. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services implements the company’s new build tooling, with support for delivering code to Apple hardware for iOS builds,” he continues.

This article entitled ‘When will the golden age of the developer end?” discusses how web development for example is still having a very low barrier of entry and needs more countries that can adopt this skill and more people that can realize the great importance of it.

So, when is this golden age of software development going to end? Nobody knows when exactly but what we can say for sure is that software development’s golden age will be around for a while. Even though it has come a long way, there are a lot of things we still expect from it and a lot of things that need a lot of improvement.

Image Source: www.stanvista.com