The current generation of engineers couldn't invent the internet
There is a legend that in South America, there is a tribe of natives who collect axe heads left behind by another ancient tribe that died out millennia ago.
They assume the axe heads come from the gods, and they don't make their own, they re-use the old ones.
Apocryphal or not, it the legend reminded me of today's startup culture.
Are we just building obvious applications on top of technologies created by a previous generation—mining it like a natural resource?
So many of the technologies that are being hyped take us farther and farther away from even understanding what they built. ¹
Firewalls too hard to understand? (use k8 ingress/egress instead or an AWS control panel), can't bother to package your dependencies (use Docker), is Linux userspace too hard to understand? (go serverless) and so on...
I wonder if the lego style development culture we practise today would even allow us to invent these foundational technologies if they weren't there for us to build upon.
I'm sure I will get ripped into for dashing off these quick thoughts. And I'll admit the argument hasn't been fleshed out as well as it could have been.
Is there perhaps a grain of truth in it anyway?
1: I had to explain sockets recently to someone who thought that you could only accept a single connection when listening on a TCP/IP socket. He thought you had to use a separate port for each incoming client connection. In a way he was kind of right (ephemeral ports), but this is despite having used and consumed other network enabled applications for his entire career.