How to explain modern software development in plain English
Summary
“Whether it is showing a web page or rendering a CGI effect in the latest Marvel movie, it all boils down to an engineer writing a set of commands in a special language that computers understand,” Opletayev says. (People who own an older home might understand the monolithic application via a "This Old House"-style analogy: Replace that shabby old hardwood in the dining room and you very well might find out you need all new subflooring and mold remediation, too.) “With all of the dependencies and configurations that an application needs to get out in the wild, recreating that environment-to-environment (like going person-to-person in the game) takes time.” Containers – along with a host of other technologies and a general move away from manual work in favor of automation wherever possible – is akin to simply writing the message down so that it will never be misunderstood, no matter how far it travels. “Modern software development should be doing something differentiating for your business – improving customer experience and driving revenue – or you should probably ask why you’re doing it,” says Gordon Haff, technology evangelist, Red Hat. “While the idea that ‘IT doesn’t matter’ was much overplayed at one point, it’s nonetheless true that cloud services including SaaS, low-code and serverless technologies – and even leaving legacy systems alone and defer modernizing them if they’re functional as-is – are all ways to channel software development resources more efficiently,” Haff says.
