On paper, bo Jun smile.

For the first 20 years of my life, all my computer-related memories were games, not code.

After working in the developer community, I was exposed to the superstructure of many technologies without a code base.

I’ve interviewed a lot of tech gods:

  • Yuhiro Matsumoto, the father of Ruby;
  • Ali CTO Lu Su;
  • Chu Ba of ants;
  • Veteran of more than 20 years of operating system development experience;
  • PMCS at the Open Source Foundation;
  • Chief architect and TECHNICAL VP of each major factory;
  • …

I have also participated in writing annual summaries and opening year forecasts in many technical areas: architecture, cloud computing, big front end, database…

Over the past six years, I’ve seen the value of technology become increasingly sought after by capital, and startups based on open source projects often get good angel funding based on a single story. The valuations of open source companies that are emblematic of technology trends, such as Snowflake’s record-breaking IPO and PingCAP’s $3 billion round of funding, have ballooned.

From the level of software development, the development and change of technology is not fast:

  • From virtual machine to container to cloud native, cloud computing has ushered in many eras in ten years.
  • From relational database to NoSQL to NewSQL, commercial database and open source database verify each other all the way forward;
  • Operators have also moved from “human operations” to DevOps, AIOps and DevSecOps, triggering a crisis of being replaced in the industry.

On the other hand, the underlying architecture develops slowly, often on a ten-year basis. Just like the update cycle of office suites before open source software.

Gartner’s annual report on the hype cycle of emerging technologies is probably the bellwether of the tech world, and it gets a lot of attention every time it comes out.

But if we stretch out the time scale to 10 or 20 years, we find that many of these so-called emerging technologies are either dying or reemerging after years of silence. This suggests at least two things: first, technology isn’t really innovating that fast; Second, the value of technology is sometimes not validated.

Looking back at some of the tech terms in the spotlight over the past few years, what can you think of? From cloud computing to ARTIFICIAL intelligence, from blockchain to cloud native, and then the recent craze for low code.

Some of these technologies are not new. Artificial intelligence, for example, is an old friend. Some are actually quite new, such as blockchain, but also face the dilemma that blockchain is a solution to a problem that it does not know what to solve.

If let us sum up the development of these technologies, the context of change, what kind of conclusion will be drawn?

From the perspective of software engineering, high cohesion and low coupling are the core standards of software design, and many laws in the field of software research and development are based on them. But later on, people found that the more complex the requirements became, the simpler and faster the software became. So while dragon slaying looks awesome, it turns out that the simple is the hardest, and the KISS principle is not that simple either.

Therefore, we find that whether it is cloud native, low code or Serverless, the general trend is technology sinking. The essence of emerging technologies is to lower the threshold under this trend, on the one hand, lower the threshold of application developers, on the other hand, lower the threshold of users. In this way, a conclusion can be drawn: the essence of technology, in fact, is the four words – reduce cost and increase efficiency.

In the consumer Internet into the bottleneck of the present, the B end of the industrial Internet red Sea, more highlights the value of this essence.

So, from my point of view, whether it is the so-called front-end “don’t update, learn not to move”, or other strange technology, in the final analysis is to reduce cost and increase efficiency. This is the essence of technology, the greatest value of technology, and the key point that will receive more attention in the future.

That’s what I, as a liberal arts student, see as the essence of technology.