Once translated an article “now the cloud war (really) begins” finally buried a hole, said to write about the cloud era after the arrival of programmers? Two months passed quickly. If we don’t fill the hole in time, we may forget it in a long time.

change

If the cloud era is like what we imagine today, and cloud computing becomes the infrastructure of the Internet like water and electricity, IT is indeed a huge technological change, and I feel that the last technological change I experienced was from traditional IT to the Internet.

Unlike other professions, being a programmer requires not only constant learning, but also the ability to learn quickly and adapt. The evolution of IT technology seems to be like a train rumbling along on its own schedule. You can only ride at its pace and speed and follow IT along.

In the nearly two decades since I learned my first programming language, BASIC, I have found that every time I change my programming language seems to correspond to a technological change. BASIC was my primary programming language in middle school, and THEN I began to learn C language in university. However, when I was about to graduate from university and take an internship, I found that more drag-pull integrated development tools like PB and Delphi were needed in the market to develop enterprise C/S applications. At that time, C/S applications were booming.

Then AFTER the internship, I didn’t go to work and took the postgraduate exam. Two years later, I went to the bank to do financial transaction systems, using a special SQL embedded C language called Pro C (if I remember correctly) to do back-end services. However, the development and change of technology at that time is B/S structure began to gradually replace THE C/S structure of the program, Java J2EE some began to side leakage of the gas of the king, constantly capture territory, at that time another state-owned big line has begun to gradually replace THE C transaction system with Java. At that time, many technical personnel doubted whether the performance of Java could support such a large transaction volume system. Now, we must not have similar concerns, but last year’s Double 11 Alipay has become the world’s highest concurrent financial transaction system.

I have been learning Java by myself since I entered graduate school, although I maintained and wrote many Pro C programs in the first year. A year later, I moved to the telecommunications industry as an operations support system and have been using Java as the primary programming language ever since. I also used Javascript for Web development. A few years ago, when the mobile Internet was booming, I looked at Objective-C for iOS, but soon after Apple released Swift, I thought IT was better to focus on it and gave up. During the back-end language is a bright spot is Google’s Go language, but that is just out of the understanding, has been watching. Now it is clear that while programming languages are often updated and represent some technological trend, they are not important and do not need to be constantly followed. Within a certain period of time you only need to master a mainstream language, what is mainstream go to TIOBE to see the ranking will know, combined with your actual work environment needs in a mainstream language to master.

Does the arrival of the cloud mean a radical change in the way we develop programming? In fact, I’m not afraid of this anymore. For a programmer who can keep up with the pace of learning, any language or development model change can be quickly picked up in the future. Sometimes we feel so dazzled by technological change that we can’t seem to keep up, and it’s perfectly normal to hear new things and new terms. The environment is changing every day, and while we need rapid technological adaptation, it’s not always adaptive.

There’s an animal called the salamander, and it’s a very old species, one of the amphibians that evolved in the middle Jurassic.

This creature is so adaptable: put it in a dark place and it will lose its eyes in two days; If you take it into the light again, it will have eyes in two days. Drop it in the water and it regresses its lungs and develops gills, get it out on land and it regresses its gills and develops lungs.

Although this creature has a strong ability to adapt to the environment, from the Jurassic to the present 100 or 200 million years, but did not therefore move to a higher level of evolution, just changed in place, and eventually became a toy of human scientists. So programmers don’t need salamanders to be hyper-adaptable and overly responsive to changes in their environment.

In the face of technological change, effective adaptability of programmers is a conscious choice and persistence.

The value of

In the cloud era, cloud computing has become an infrastructure like water and electricity, which is bound to lead to further differentiation of programmers. Many of the distributed problems we face today are solved or masked by services provided by infrastructure. Just as today we develop programs that take advantage of many of the capabilities provided by operating systems, operating systems or virtual machines or containers are the infrastructure we rely on today.

There aren’t a lot of companies that provide infrastructure like operating systems right now, so there probably won’t be a lot of companies that can provide cloud infrastructure in the future. Most of the basic technical problems will be solved by cloud infrastructure companies, so today’s students who are entangled in pure technical development or business development will inevitably face clear choice differentiation in the cloud era.

Cloud companies in the cloud era, their core business and the problems they face are today’s pure technical problems. In addition to being able to solve and encapsulate into services, they also need to constantly reduce costs and optimize efficiency, which is the direct embodiment of the real technical value in the cloud. Amazon’s ability to cut prices 44 times in a succession to prevent competitors from entering is a reflection of the comprehensive strength of technology. In the future, only a few cloud companies will be able to control the cost of providing services under the price of free market competition, and it will be inevitable that programmers who are dedicated to the pursuit of the top of technology will choose to join such a few cloud companies.

What about the value of programmers who are more interested in the business and prefer to do business development? Cloud companies encapsulate the core technical challenges of business development, and cloud development has become the choice of the vast majority of startups. Does that mean cloud-oriented business development programmers will become less valuable?

Some time ago, I read an article called “A river of IT people”, which is a river of how to prove the value of IT work to the business. What I can see now is that perhaps the biggest core value for business development programmers in the cloud era is the need to build Bridges across this huge river. Business-oriented technologists need to see and understand the value chain of the business, and embed the value of presentation technology in this chain.

If the infrastructure and technical services provided by cloud companies in the cloud era will be the engine of a car, then business-oriented programmers will be the gearbox. There may not be many engines to choose from in the future, so gearboxes that differentiate vehicles will be crucial. (Ok, I’m not really familiar with how cars work, so I don’t know if that’s a good analogy.)

Unable to change, see and grasp the whole value chain of a link to avoid complete marginalization.

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Thriving industry or company, just like a new car, if you are only in which to do the air filter work, there is no sense of crisis?

Write some words, draw some pictures. Wechat public number “instant between”, you might as well pay attention to have a look when you meet.