On Mastery and skills

Over the years, the software industry has witnessed unprecedented growth that unavoidably led to the birth of new technologies. Some programing languages were born, some others vanished or got delegated to a specific domain on which they shine the best. On the other hand, just a handful of these technologies survived the constants waves of innovation.

The internet as we know it keeps evolving. So do the gears that propel its evolution, these gears are millions of lines of code, developed and maintained by organizations and individuals all over the world.

Just a few years ago a backend developer had limited options to choose from with the development of new applications, the stack was — with slight differences — a mix between a programming language, the weapon-of-choice database, and some caching layer. Then once again the software industry boomed with a bast pool of possibilities including SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and IaC just to mention a few.

The mindset and skills of previous developers are not enough to survive today’s world demands, it makes me wonder if we should keep pursuing mastery on a language/tool, rather than the knowledge related to how things are built. At your own leisure take a look at this video of Mark Zukerberg describing web-server optimization, everything described there it’s not only expected but taken for granted today.

Should we keep pursuing mastery on a language/tool, rather than the knowledge related to how things are built?

Nowadays developers can choose from a pool of languages and tools, and services to speed up the development of new applications.

Think about it, you don’t have to roll up your own:

• Payment system
• Newsletter
• Web/Cache server?

Right now and no different from the past we stand over the giants’ shoulders to do more, reach further and do it faster. Only these giants were born just a couple of years ago. It’s on us to push something new into the world, so more people can learn from it, use it, and probably be someone else shoulders.