Why software development has turned into integration?
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Last week, we had a coffee with my friend and we were talking about our jobs as we both work in the software industry. One of the themes was that it has become more boring than it used to be and we quickly identified the reason: it doesn’t feel so exciting anymore. Figuring out why, we came to a conclusion that the way software development is done has changed. In the early days of my career and even in school, when everything was new and interesting, I think I wrote new algorithms on a daily or at least on a weekly basis. And by algorithms I mean some pieces of code you really had to think through and debug line by line to find the edge cases and make it work as fast as possible. Now it’s mostly cutting and gluing pieces together.
Let’s take for example a web frontend application. You have React and UI framework set up already, provided by your company’s skeleton project. Need to make HTTP requests to backend? npm install axios. Need to save global state of your application? npm install @reduxjs-toolkit or react-redux. And then just integrate these to your application perhaps using VSCode with GitHub Copilot that does most of the copy-paste work for you. Fast, easy and very efficient.