Look here's a story: We just had our national holiday in Germany and therefore a long weekend. So I decided to code an update for an iPhone app I have. The app lets the user create funny pictures, so I thought it would be cool to have an online gallery with user-created pictures, where people could vote on the best ones and have a weekly top list. Now this is far from trivial though, suddenly I need online storage, a database for users and votes, and a webservice to handle all of that. So I looked around, found Node.js, MongoDB, Heroku and S3, signed up, started reading, learning and coding. 2 Days later and the first version is done and working. How much did I know about this before and how much does this stack cost me? Almost nothing.
So where's my point with this? First, this kind of story would be impossible just a few years ago. When you realize, how it's now possible for a small developer to reach potentially tens of thousands of users, without the need of a big budget or being in control of delivery channels. When you realize, how much powerful resources are now right at the fingertips of the average developer, how you just need to sit down, read and learn, and you are able to implement even the wildest ideas - then I can't help but think these times are great!
Coding is still hard and despite advancement in technology, it may not have gotten much easier. But many things that used to be straight out impossible, can now, with the right commitment, be archived from the comfort of your own four walls.
How would what you did be impossible a few years ago? The specific services and products that you listed might not have been available, but they are hardly required for something so simple. Any competent Perl developer could have done the same thing in a couple days a decade ago.
Of course a competent Perl developer could have, after all that is his domain, but he'd still needs to come up with scalable hosting somewhere and why exactly would he want to do that in the first place?. As someone who's primary field isn't web development its amazing what one can put together in a weekend these days - if I had, say, a J2ME app a decade ago and wanted to do the same thing, I don't think I'd even try.
Look here's a story: We just had our national holiday in Germany and therefore a long weekend. So I decided to code an update for an iPhone app I have. The app lets the user create funny pictures, so I thought it would be cool to have an online gallery with user-created pictures, where people could vote on the best ones and have a weekly top list. Now this is far from trivial though, suddenly I need online storage, a database for users and votes, and a webservice to handle all of that. So I looked around, found Node.js, MongoDB, Heroku and S3, signed up, started reading, learning and coding. 2 Days later and the first version is done and working. How much did I know about this before and how much does this stack cost me? Almost nothing.
So where's my point with this? First, this kind of story would be impossible just a few years ago. When you realize, how it's now possible for a small developer to reach potentially tens of thousands of users, without the need of a big budget or being in control of delivery channels. When you realize, how much powerful resources are now right at the fingertips of the average developer, how you just need to sit down, read and learn, and you are able to implement even the wildest ideas - then I can't help but think these times are great!
Coding is still hard and despite advancement in technology, it may not have gotten much easier. But many things that used to be straight out impossible, can now, with the right commitment, be archived from the comfort of your own four walls.