Infosys | Microsoft

Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO c. 1981 - “640k is all the memory your computer will ever need.”

On another one of those reminiscing days – days when I just sit and think about... well, just sit and think – I thought how easy a developer’s life would have been in the eighties. With the luxury of an unbelievable 640k memory, coding in MS-DOS based editors where the keywords don’t change colors, no hassles of “clicking”, and heck you didn’t even need an ergonomic keyboard. The Lunar Landing Module on Apollo 11, the spacecraft that landed Neil Armstrong on the moon, had – hold your breath – 74k of memory!

Ah well, now let me see what the present day developer has on average. 2 gigs of memory (approximately 27 times more than the computer that landed Mr. Armstrong), colorful editors, advanced technologies, sophisticated deployment methods (where every method is supposedly more sophisticated than its predecessors), notebook computers that could almost fit into your pocket, and superfast processors like what good old Moore predicted.

Isn’t it a thing of surprise that people around the world continue to talk of making the developer’s life easier? Actually, No.

Fast growing technologies and increasing business complexities have taking their toll on the developer community. Colorful editors and Aero effects are no solace, when it comes to slogging out those thousand lines of code and a few months later, upgrading all of them to the then latest technology. A year later, upgrade them again. A yet another year later, upgrade and enhance and fix hitherto unseen production bottlenecks. And then, like the old warship, ditch it and start afresh (“reengineer”, in fairer words).

Business is a hard task master. And technology becomes its humble slave, puffing and panting to serve its needs of continually enabling faster, better and cheaper business. And innovations are the mercenaries that drive the developers into constantly accelerating with the pace of this conundrum.

Starting this post, we discuss a slew of ideas and technologies used to implement a few of them – all of which focus at making the life of a developer simpler, make him sweat a little lesser and breathe easier.

A man touched down on the moon, and technology has connected the world like never before, and behind all of that is the countless lines of code developers have eked out from the tip of their fingers. And the world would continue to strive in a constant need to make them all the more productive.

"Yes, We Can."