Sometimes, you just have to get into the game. Such was the case for me in gaining deeper knowledge of how developers code. And how the cloud frees everything.
It’s been a very long time since I did meaningful coding (COBOL) and figured it was time to gain hands on knowledge of today’s coders. I had played with UNIX a bit 20 years ago while with KPMG but wanted to get my hands dirty and better understand how to actually code in today’s environment including writing API’s to AWS. I didn’t have a spare computer around to reimage so did the next best thing.
I picked up a Raspberry Pi through Amazon and went all in learning how to SSH into the Pi, code in Python, and write API’s to move files to S3. And I feel good. Here’s a couple of quick observations:
The Open Source community is amazing. Everything you need to develop applications is readily available, and essentially free. I’ve been speaking and presenting on the rise of LINUX and OpenStack for years however I now have an even greater appreciation. The new breed of developers of Open Source.
Developers have unprecedented power. They can write incredibly powerful programs on very small and affordable computers. Take that power and amplify it with the power of cloud computing, and they could rewrite any application. Can you imagine the banking industry with time honored dependency on mainframe computing, having its code written for the cloud. It would be the final dagger that ends the mainframe for good.
The future bellows to 20 somethings (and younger). They get it. The world has changed. Dependencies have been broken down. My generations needs to adopt, or just get out of the way.
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