AWS and the democratization of development
BY: Marco Calderon Soto
Profile: Java Fullstack Developer Senior
Computer Science Engineer, +10 years doing app development backend with AWS,
cloud computing solutions and Node Js.
My own experience...
"We are playing in Hard Mode", a colleague tells me when we were talking about the personal and professional moment, very similar to which we are currently going through: Both with children in the same age range and working on more than one project at the same time. "After a while we will be playing in Normal Mode and in a couple of years we will be playing in Easy Mode, and that's when we will be much better." I had never thought of it in those terms, but the analogy also applies to the learning and implementation of new technologies and others not so new.
I decided to open my AWS account at the end of 2014, and it has been one of the best professional decisions I have made in my life. At that moment, I was working in an indie studio developing video games with 5 or 6 other friends. We had “routine calls” calls daily with the CEO, but that day, that call did not have anything of "routine": He explained that the studio could not continue any longer, but that there was a plan for us to keep our jobs. As the call continued, I kept thinking "I have to get out of here as soon as possible, and I have to start doing something on my own." That call pushed me towards to the beginning of my new professional career.
I remember destroying more than one EC2 t2. micro instance in my attempts to set up an apache server and host a site in PHP. The next thing was to install LAMP and experiment with this new world that I had discovered. It did not take long (I'm very obsessive, optimistic, and a bit impulsive) to dare to develop my first system for a client. Then it was another client. The first customer's system upgrade followed. Then more projects. I could not believe that I was managing my servers myself, hosting applications, sending emails, and doing things that were once too expensive. It was at this time that I began to use the term “Democratization of development”.
For me, who was in a desperate situation, having discovered a place that at a very low cost allowed me to have access to different services with which I could develop and offer solutions to clients, was a watershed. The fact that a developer could access these conditions and services also meant that the public, in general, could access products that were normally unreachable for economic and supply reasons.
I'm sure this is the best time to be a developer. There are different platforms that offer great services at low cost. We must take advantage of them to help the young person who sells artisanal pizzas to have an email with their domain, so that the dentist with 20 years of work can stay current through a website and contact form ... we can help them start their game the closest thing to Easy Mode.
I started playing in Hard Mode with AWS, and based on experimenting, studying, messing, implementing, and repeating the cycle, things have been improving. I cannot assure you that I will play in Easy Mode in the immediate future, but I am confident that as long as the developer community continues to collaborate as they have been doing (and I think of frameworks like Serverless), at least, I want to continue contributing for what I call “Democratization of development”.