In the 1970s, you needed a punch card and a terminal to add two numbers. Today you need a 300-line YAML pipeline, four audit approvals, a dozen quality gates, and a cloud budget the size of a small country. Welcome to the world of software engineering and the progress we’ve made in burning money like it’s going out of fashion (no, this is not an article about crypto-currency).
Of course, nobody in the 1970s imagined that adding two numbers together would one day involve three cloud regions, six security audits, and a Kubernetes cluster named after a Tolkien character. In those days, the problems were visible and real: that dropped punch card on the floor, people queuing at terminals to queue their jobs, and the ever-present risk of a janitor mistaking your month’s work for recycling. Today, our obstacles are less about cardboard and more about cardboard-cutout processes.
To ship a single line of business logic, we scaffold it with unit tests, integration tests, contract tests, platform YAML, infra YAML, secrets managers, dashboards, and three different CI/CD pipelines; each proudly…