{"id":417,"date":"2012-06-13T16:26:30","date_gmt":"2012-06-13T23:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=417"},"modified":"2012-06-13T16:26:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-13T23:26:30","slug":"software-accelerating-the-development-of-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/software-accelerating-the-development-of-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"software: accelerating the development of EVERYTHING"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Draft incomplete thoughts and missing links but I just <strong>had<\/strong> to get something out&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Marc Andreessen said software is eating entire industries, and from my own personal experience he&#8217;s really onto something.<\/p>\n<p>Most heard about Facebook buying Instagram for one BILLION dollars, with <a title=\"great infographic\" href=\"http:\/\/infographics.fastcompany.com\/miscellaneous\/purchase-of-instagram.gif\">predictable shock<\/a>. NYTimes is 116 years old , Instagram is 557 days old with $0 revenue, and both worth $1bn (Instagram worth $77M per employee). But something they overlook is the mountains of stuff the 13 employees at Instagram adopted . The <a title=\"Instagram infrastructure\/architecture summary\" href=\"http:\/\/instagram-engineering.tumblr.com\/post\/13649370142\/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of\">list of technologies<\/a> they integrated to be able to serve 30M users is dizzying. Nearly all the software is free, and the services they pay for (storage, servers, etc.) are pay-as-you-go and cheap because they also leverage free software.<\/p>\n<p>I assume any and all the improvements Instgram made to their tools are free and were developed in the openshared development. It would cost them more to keep them in-house. <em>Anyone in the world<\/em> can follow their steps to provide an app to 30,000,000 people.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8230;XX more on github and shared development<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>Rapid development spreads<\/h2>\n<p>Now it&#8217;s spreading to management. <a title=\"founder's blog post\" href=\"http:\/\/ryancarson.com\/post\/24884883426\/how-i-manage-40-people-remotely\">A guy runs a 40-person company remotely<\/a> using online tools, web-based project management, private messaging to teams, etc. No human resources department, no middle managers, no waste.<\/p>\n<p>You can see the tools and systems that software development is producing to improve &amp; accelerate itself are spilling <em>up<\/em> into general management, and <em>over <\/em>into other industries. This is Andreesen&#8217;s insight. <em>Links needed.<\/em>\u00a0 Will dinosaurs in construction\/health care\/ education notice the blurry figures zooming past them?<\/p>\n<h2>Accelerated software slims down and shakes off layers<\/h2>\n<p>The unavoidable reality for me is I made a decent living interfacing developers with the outside world: writing documentation, testing software before it goes out, providing tech support for outside developers, packaging SDKs (even burning the CD-ROMs), feeding bugs and enhancement ideas to them. But the &#8220;open&#8221; movement destroys the whole notion of outside developers. <em>Link to old Cluetrain manifesto\u00a0<\/em> And software development inevitably develops the tools to accelerate and minimize all the tasks that get in the way of pure programming, including the jobs I performed. Github does them for you:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the site integrates simple markup and implements a wiki so project developers can easily make their own online documentation<\/li>\n<li>developers can skip the manual and view the code to figure how it works<\/li>\n<li>anyone can contribute documentation<\/li>\n<li>anyone can file an issue<\/li>\n<li>the site builds a download of your project<\/li>\n<li>And critically in all these areas, an outside developer can use git&#8217;s distributed development &#8220;Here&#8217;s my fix to the code\/documentation\/examples\/tests, please review and incorporate it&#8221; so improvements can happen <strong>hourly<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I can code, so all these tools help me do a better job at it just as much as they help a stone-cold genius programmer. But my velocity remains underwhelming compared with a superstar. Every company is desperate to hire someone like Instagram&#8217;s 13, but the world is full of me.<\/p>\n<p>My dream is I take my understanding of how rapidly systems can develop back to some stodgy institution (<em>Gibson quote The future is here but it&#8217;s unevenly distributed<\/em>)\u00a0 and say &#8220;Talented people can pump out improvements unimaginably fast&#8230; I&#8217;m not super-talented myself, but I&#8217;ve seen how the greats do it and can encourage the process by writing things up on your wiki.&#8221;<\/p>\n<h2>Browser-based accelerates faster than all<\/h2>\n<p>This distributed development in the open benefits anything that can be expressed in 1s and 0s: not just software but textbooks, media, genetic sequences (!), computer-aided design, and soon even physical parts (with 3-D printers).<\/p>\n<p>Almost without exception you&#8217;re using all these tools in a browser, so if the end result of accelerated development is something that itself runs in a browser, it&#8217;s <em>completely friction-free<\/em>. Every moment someone makes an improvement, you get a better web application.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Draft incomplete thoughts and missing links but I just had to get something out&#8230; Marc Andreessen said software is eating entire industries, and from my own personal experience he&#8217;s really onto something. Most heard about Facebook buying Instagram for one &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/software-accelerating-the-development-of-everything\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}