The Benefits Coders Can Expect In The Future

More Effective Design Solutions

Brute force coding still exists. Basically, that’s coding line after line–what you’ve imagined before. But more often, tech professionals are changing design approaches so algorithms and the like can save time. An algorithm is like if you memorized something so you didn’t have to learn it again, but in the coding world. That’s way more simple than an algorithm is, but for this post, that describes what they do pretty well. Algorithms like this allow more imagination and design-centered creation to be useful.

While it’s true designers can customize more in terms of software engineering when coders understand how to put something together from the ground level, in the near future, this isn’t going to be necessary.

Think about cloud computing as an example. Here are several design apps made possible through the cloud that have been making waves in the tech world for some time now. Cloud computing brings more power to the table for small businesses that was only available at the big business level before, or through a cutting-edge computer system located at the site where a business operated.

Today, businesses and individuals can get the same sort of solutions as big businesses at a monthly cost that’s predictable. For many businesses and entrepreneurs, this is more affordable than running a complex computer system on-site. In the modern world, applications you can use on a mobile device or laptop are so common they’re almost like the business cards of yesteryear.

Secondary Applications

It’s almost a basic expectation that a business should have some sort of application today. The app doesn’t have to be a groundbreaking, game-changing piece of software; it could just be a glorified sign-up form. Still, applications communicate professionalism, and a business who doesn’t have one may be less able to compete than other similar operations.

Thankfully, as software engineering becomes more user-friendly, the brute-force difficulty involved in design gets smaller. Also, different algorithms can be used on such software to help manage it with less complication. Still, if you design an application, you need to monitor its operation to ensure things are going as they should.

Beta testing is basically this kind of monitoring at work. Applications are put into a market of users and monitored to see how the software holds up. There are always going to be little bugs and issues that are missed in a program’s initial design. This is because human designers are imperfect.

That said, every eighteen months the ability of computers doubles on itself–this is something Gordon Moore noticed in the mid-sixties. It is a phenomenon known as “Moore’s Law”. New automated design and management functions develop as computer ability doubles. These developments help take human error from the design process, allowing for more effective programming. There are entire families of Application Performance Management (APM) options which can be used on applications of varying levels of complexity in order to ensure they work the best.

A Closer Look At APM

What is application performance management? 10 APM features help describe it in action. These are a little complicated, but understanding them is something anyone in this field needs to do eventually. For example, several really important APM features include code level performance profiling, performance of every “transaction” and web request, and application log data.

Code level performance profiling basically means how designed code is performing in different areas of a program or application. Transaction performance is basically how things work when somebody using a program makes it do something on the internet–if this isn’t done right, things happen to slow.

Application log data is basically when a program has an error, and that error is automatically recorded. Then designers can look at it, and see what they need to fix. When you can look at a log with less difficulty, you can identify and fix problems easier.

These are only three important APM features many coders find very necessary in designing software. Cloud monitoring solutions are increasing in popularity as well, allowing you to keep an eye on applications that are contained on the cloud.

What These Features Mean

These features become more effective with technological development, and it’s expected that in the very near future, those without a coding background will be able to produce and manage applications that are every bit as reliable and usable as those put together through the skill of professional coders.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing increase in social influence, such widespread coding becomes even more accessible. Basically, the internet today has taken big steps into “decentralized” territory. That means instead of a bunch of big computers called servers being where the information for the web is stored, it is instead stored and processed across all the billions of mobile devices across the globe. A disaster can’t knock out the internet now, because it’s everywhere at once.

Businesses are able to cut substantial costs from operation, allowing them to expand in how effective they are while reducing how much it costs to run things. Since tech is always getting twice as good as it was every eighteen months, you can expect changes like the ones here to be come along more and more quickly.

Websites like TheGrid.com allow users to design their own sites, and those sites change themselves using different machine-learning techniques so users don’t have to update them manually. Machine-learning is just what it sounds like: coding helps machines “learn” from being used.

Thinking About How This Works In The Real World

Technology breakthroughs like these aren’t quite as the tech people advertise them yet, but the ability is there; it just needs to be refined. What this means is those who have skill in coding will probably always have a niche in IT, even if the “algorithms” do most of the work for them. That said, it’s going to be an increasingly small niche which gets more valuable as time goes by, as fewer and fewer people will know how to do it.

Except for those coders who have strong clients, a shift–or what’s called a “pivot” in the business world–toward the use of app design and management software will likely be what is needed. But then again, this kind of fast-forward change is and always has been the core of technology. Since Gordon Moore noticed exponential doubling of circuitry in the sixties, it’s been important for technologists to keep changing going forward. If they don’t, they quickly fall behind.

The good news is, user friendly design fixes are getting more and more common. The bad news is, those with specific skills may find a decrease in mainstream demand, unless they find core clients or areas where such “niche” skills don’t go out of “style”.

People who used to be skilled in technology jobs like floppy disk repair and design in the nineties aren’t around anymore, because nobody uses that old technology anymore. If they didn’t transition into new technology, they quit working in tech. So if you get into technology, you need to learn to “pivot” when the time comes, and also make full use of new technology breakthroughs when they’re available.

–EOF (Coding For Speed) —

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