“Developers, developers, developers!” Steve Ballmer bellowed on-stage, his shirt drenched in sweat as he repeatedly chanted the word at a Microsoft conference twenty years ago. He was making the point, in his usual over-excited way, that developers were of central importance to his company.
We can chuckle today at that YouTube video of Ballmer, but actually, he was spot on: developers are critical to software innovation. Yet sometimes we forget that. In the Dot Com era, Venture Capitalists held sway. In the web 2.0 era, entrepreneurs rushed to take advantage of “user-generated content.” In the mobile era, everyone fell under the control of social media algorithms. Developers, of course, participated in each era — but other forces were driving the market, whether it be the greed of investors or the vanity of “influencers.”
In the cloud native era, that’s all changed — developers have come to the fore once again. When Amazon launched its first cloud service in 2006, if you listened closely you would’ve heard a faint chant of “developers, developers, developers!” start up again. But if you missed it then, the chant was a loud, rhythmic pulse by the time Docker launched containers in 2013.
Developers are in the driver’s seat again partly due to the complexity of this current era (we need developers to navigate the cloud). But it’s also because of the massive scale of applications now. A consumer service like Netflix or Spotify could not run anywhere near as efficiently as they do today, without cloud services and distributed computing.
One person who noticed this shift early on was Tyler Jewell, who is currently managing director at Dell Technologies Capital (yes he’s a VC, but he assured me his roots are in development). Jewell has come up with a thesis called the Developer-Led Landscape, which is divided into 22 main segments — including App Servers, Developer Enablement, Code IDE, and CI + CD + Build. He’s also made available a GitHub repository, which lists every company and product in the thesis, mapped to categories, segments and specializations.
#cloud native #development #op-ed #profile #react native
