It's the end of era where the plucky code crafter gets to have a seat at the table of production. Those skills are going to become less and less useful going forward. Industry is going to stop hiring those types.
The future of software looks a lot more like factory production lines with a small group of architect-tier engineers working on a design with product management and then feeding it into the factory for prototyping and production.
If you're not an experienced late senior or principal engineer at your career stage by now there is basically no future for you in this industry. Lower end roles will continue to be reduced. People who can build and maintain the factory and understand its outputs are going to be the remaining high-value software talent.
I'd really like to see package managers organized around rings where a very small core of incredibly important stuff is kept in ring 0, ring 1 gets a slightly wider amount of stuff and can only depend on ring 0 dependencies and then ring 2+ is the crapware libraries that infect most ecosystems.
But maybe that's not the right fit either. The world where package managers are just open to whatever needs to die. It's no longer a safe model.
The OS distro model is actually the right one here. Upstream authors hate it, but having a layer that's responsible for picking versions out of the ecosystem and compiling an internally consistent grouping of known mutually-compatible versions that you can subscribe to means that a lot of the random churn just falls away. Once you've got that layer, you only need to be aware of security problems in the specific versions you care about, you can specifically patch only them, and you've got a distribution channel for the fixes where it's far more feasible to say "just auto-apply anything that comes via this route".
That model effectively becomes your ring 1. Ring 0 is the stdlib and the package manager itself, and - because you would always need to be able to step outside the distribution for either freshness or "that's not been picked up by the distro yet" reasons - the ecosystem package repositories are the wild west ring 2.
In the language ecosystems I'm only aware of Quicklisp/Ultralisp and Haskell's Stackage that work like this. Everything else is effectively a rolling distro that hasn't realised that's what it is yet.
In practice, "ring 0" is whatever gets merged into your language's standard library. Node and python both have pretty expansive standard libraries at this point, stepping outside of those is a choice
The authors want me to trust them to handle all my passwords. I'm not going to do that if they don't respect me enough to tell me I'm reading AI-generated content.
You're right, it's actually the people throwing around inflammatory statements like "bootlickers" to virtue signal and score fake internet points that are doing the most harm.
Sure it does, just say you "established org-wide coding standards and drove adoption of automated linting tooling, reducing review friction and enforcing style consistency at scale" in your assessment.
Ugh this makes me nostalgic for the days of Q3-era game map making and custom servers. I used to get lost in the various games Radiant variants as a teen building DM and CTF maps for my clans server.
Did you end up going into game dev or just generally software development? I'm always jealous of the people who grew up making maps or game mods, I wish I'd been more motivated when I was younger to do stuff like that.
Software dev. Game dev never really appealed to me. I kind of have an artsy streak inside of me and map making always felt like additive sculpture which is probably why it appealed.
> GitHub has recently seen more outages, in part because its central data center in Virginia is indeed resource-constrained and running into scaling issues. AI agents are part of the problem here. But it’s our understanding that some GitHub employees are concerned about this migration because GitHub’s MySQL clusters, which form the backbone of the service and run on bare metal servers, won’t easily make the move to Azure and lead to even more outages going forward.
Age-old lesson: change the tires on the moving vehicle that is your business when it's a Geo Metro, not when it's a freight train.
I'm sure the people with the purse strings didn't care, though, and just wanted to funnel the GH userbase into Azure until the wheels fell off, then write off the BU. Bought for $7.5B, it used to make $250M, but now makes $2B, so they could offload it make a profit. I wonder who'll buy it. Prob Google, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, or a hedge fund. They could choose not to sell it, but it'll end up a writeoff if the userbase jumps ship.
The future of software looks a lot more like factory production lines with a small group of architect-tier engineers working on a design with product management and then feeding it into the factory for prototyping and production.
If you're not an experienced late senior or principal engineer at your career stage by now there is basically no future for you in this industry. Lower end roles will continue to be reduced. People who can build and maintain the factory and understand its outputs are going to be the remaining high-value software talent.
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