Tag Archives: Software Development

Episode 101

In the previous part of this article, we continued a journey through important milestones in the history of software development through the eighties and nineties, including non-obvious influences of Gamers and Hackers, Version Control, Open Source, Common Runtime Environments, Virtual Machines, Agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration, and Automated Tests.

Image by Jose Borges

In this part, we will mostly explore what happened in the last twenty years, but as usually some of the concepts can be traced back to earlier times. As previously, we will be interested not only in pure technology but also methodologies and organizational ideas.

Extreme Programming and Software Craftsmanship

Prominent methodologies within Agile software development like Scrum or Kanban, provided some organizational guidelines over the process, which while very useful, is not very specific on the technical side. While navigating various simple and complex organizational ideas at the top, the industry was seeking a decent codification of good engineering practices at the bottom. One such approach was Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 100

And here we are, dear reader, six years and one hundred episodes later. The idea and form of this blog did evolve a bit over the years, from being a diary of a project through a collection of book reviews, conference reports, introductions to various IT technologies and concepts, article series on Spring, AWS, and web API design. There was digging up in history, a little bit on hardware, a little bit on people, and a little bit on dragons. There is not so much Java here anymore, so in the retrospective, one might think that the blog name is not exactly adequate. We all have our roots and backgrounds though and I’m kind of a sentimental person.

Image by Sergey Vasnev

We are also in the middle of another journey here. In the first part of this article, we traced the early history of significant milestones in the evolution of software development, starting with early achievement in computer science and first hardware through Assembler, recognition of Software Engineering, Compilers, Unified Hardware Architectures, Object-Oriented Languages, Design Patterns, Personal Computers, IDEs and finally The Internet and WEB APIs. We assessed how all that created and shaped the IT industry through the decades. In this part, we will catch up with the timeline somewhere between the eighties and the nineties and traverse towards a new millennium. Software development as an engineering discipline has changed a lot over this time as well. Several key phenomena fuelled those changes, and we are going to explore them right now.

Gamers and Hackers

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of stimulating the growth of software development is computer games. Many people are not aware, that the computer games industry nowadays is worth over twice the film and music industry combined (154B vs 41B + 19B in 2018) and is growing at a 10% yearly rate. This has several consequences. Read the rest of this entry »