The goal of pretty much any framework/plattform that you use — from a PaaS offering to application server and everything in between — is to make you more productive by taking care of some technical complexity for you: “Focus on the business logic, not the technology”.
Frameworks and platforms speed up development so that you can ship faster. And it’s true that you can ship faster: You can now, with current technologies, build an internet-scale service, highly available, able to handles millions of transactions per seconds, in a few month. It would have been unimaginable one decade ago.
The peak of productivity is achieved when you master your stack completely. You can then spend significant time working on business feature with little friction around technology itself.
Sadly, the peak of productivity is rarely reached.
One of the reasons is that developers get bored too early. Once the technical groundwork is in place and you just have to use it, it becomes boring. It’s fun to set up a whole analytics pipeline to solve this first analytics problem. Using the exact same pipeline to solve another problem? Boring.
Go ask a developer to use your existing infrastrucutre and stack as is and simply implement new features. I bet they will be lukewarm if they don’t see any technological problem to solve, or at least some technology to learn.
I speak from experience. The project I’m working on is an application for which a dedicated platform was built. This platform provides all sorts of thing to write applications, ranging from messaging, message processing, fault tolerance, configuration management, job scheduling. You can reuse these buildings blocks to design new features. As long as features requires new combination of building blocks, it’s interesting. But once it feels like using the same pattern every time, it becomes boring, even if it’s actually the moment you’re the most productive.
What motivates developpers is leveraging technologies to solve a problem. They are interested in figuring out how to use technology for your problem, not actually having more time writing business logic. Engineers have studied computer science because they like technology more than other business domains.
Technology platforms and frameworks – app servers, cloud, data pipelines, web framework, etc. – are so amazingly complex that you will need to solve several problems with them before you feel like you master them. Also, even if you master the technologies individually, the combination of the technologies might pose some new challenges. At the same time, technology changes very fast. This is another reason why we rarely reach the peak productivity: technologies change before we truly master them. Technology evolves fast and we’re always playing catch-up.
A VM is for instance way easier to deal with than physical hardware. Using VMs definitely improves productivity. But as soon as you have VMs you want to become elastic. And for this, you need a whole you set of tools to learn and master. Progress in technology takes the form of layers that piles on. When you’ve barely master the first layer comes already the second one. These new layers, once mastered, enable new jumps in productivity though.
Not reaching peak productivity isn’t in itself a problem, since productivity grows nevertheless. Curiosity is what makes us push technology. What’s interesting is to realize that productivity and curiosity are actually at odd. It’s because we are curious that we never truly master our technologies and don’t reach peak productivity. But it’s also because we are curious that productivity in the long term always increases.
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In fact, we anticipate that there will soon be a whole generation of developers who have never touched a server and only write business logic.
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