[zaptheimpaler]

Well beginning in 2008ish, we saw websites and applications that served the entire world, literally billions of users. That simply did not exist before then. The internet as a whole was a tiny part of peoples lives. All the stuff that went into solving that was genuinely new ideas in servers, databases, ops, data centre's etc. Eventual consistency went from being a joke to the only game in town. Distributed computing on large data sets went from a Google paper in 2005 on Hadoop to a widely used idea. Smartphones went from zero to iPhone to literally more than half the world has one. Devops became standard. Google went from just managing 1 or 2 datacenters to running AI to optimize the power efficiency of each one.

When you already have architecture that is capable of serving the entire world, when everyone has a smartphone all that's left in that space is efficiency/cost optimization. Whatever shiny new programming language or framework comes out, the bedrock of computing is solid (and the shiny new programming language is really mashing together decades old ideas which is cool if you're new to them but boring if you're not) . Every company is a mess on the inside of course, but they do their core functions well enough. AWS did not exist 10 years ago, now it's big internet drama when it goes down for a few hours twice a YEAR.A detailed postmortem comes out (not standard before), revealing the problem was a configuration change (because everything has long since been automated, so it's driven purely by configuration) .

I know not everyone is interested in those same problems, but I thought they were interesting and what's left now in the guts of software is an adoption phase, people rediscovering lessons that others long since figured out. Perhaps people who work on higher layers of the stack think differently, I'm only interested in the deep tech below, and it's pretty solid at this point.

[willberman]

There's still lots of relevant work to do deeper in the stack. It might just not be at large internet scale companies (I doubt this but lets assume it's true). Most every university has a systems research lab doing interesting things. I think I paged through 5 different professor's websites in CMU's systems department the other month and found 9-10 interesting projects.