[com2kid]

> Extensive dependency chain of brittle logic that needs tons of planning and preparation to update and manage is not unreasonable description for microservices architecture from an ops perspective.

I've seen monoliths that fit that description.

Once you've automated the deployment and configuration of load balancers, firewalls, caches, proxies, and have a DB with automatic failover, that is also sharded for performance, spreading the code out across a few machines is not the hard part.

[compiskey]

Maybe it’s a bit literal but I see lots of people at computers planning updating just like I did 20 years ago.

From the IT workers context a lot has changed but the end user outputs are still; video game, chat app, email app, todo app, fintech app, dating app, state management DSL.

AI isn’t going to change the outputs so much as minimize the people and code needed to generate them. Because we’ve mined the value prop of desktops and phones to death.

Materials science, additive manufacturing, biology, are outputting actual net new knowledge. Consumer facing IT is whittling a log into a chair leg, grabbing a new log, whittling a chair leg… but faster!

[com2kid]

> From the IT workers context a lot has changed but the end user outputs are still; video game, chat app, email app, todo app, fintech app, dating app, state management DSL.

All of those are working at scales 10x-100x what they were 20 years ago.

Back in 2002 people had to worry about how many emails they had on their machine. Searching unlimited emails? Not happening.

Now with SSDs, better search indexes, more memory, more CPU, handling instantly searching gigabytes of emails on my laptop is not even considered to be a "problem", it just is.

I can drop a hundred 10 megabyte GIFs into a Discord thread and my phone will render everything just fine. Go back to 2008 and, well, there isn't any equivalent because no one was crazy enough to build a platform where you could even try doing that.

OKCupid's backend was written in C++ and was probably the pinnacle of what dating site backend design will ever be, so actually you have a point there. :-D

A good todo apps can geofence[1] your position, remind you to get milk when you are at the supermarket! The amount of tech making that possible is insane. IMHO todo apps have a long way to go, it is sad that Android is going backwards in this regard.

> Consumer facing IT is whittling a log into a chair leg, grabbing a new log, whittling a chair leg… but faster!

That is the entire history of computing.

Our faster whittling has allowed other fields to improve themselves many times over.

[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/google-assistant-assigned-remi...

[naikrovek]

ok, ok, we get it. everything new is stupid and everything from your generation is not...

[compiskey]

I wasn’t boosting past software. Doing so would be banal nostalgia.

I’m saying the doing matters, not the software; we throw it away and regenerate it all the time. It’s disposable ephemera.

It’s literally just the creative process that matters.