We hit the magical 2000-subscriber mark while I’m on vacation. If you’re a subscriber, thank You! If you aren’t, you know what to do 😄. Also, because I’m on vacation, consider this a loosely written post, put together on my phone on the second try, because the Substack mobile app deleted my first draft. 😅
I shipped my first software on a USB stick.
It was 2005 or something. My father worked for a company that sold construction materials. Inflation was soaring and prices were updated weekly based on foreign currencies.
I created a software using PHP and HTML to store inventory and prices. You could recalculate prices for thousands of items with a click of a button.
Deploying my initial version required some coordination.
There was one PC at the store but it was already in heavy use. Salespeople couldn’t work from it while I installed the software (copying files with Total Commander).
I had to get it right for the first time because every subsequent update would have required salespeople to stop using the computer which slowed sales.
I had no tests or type checks.
Why It Matters
We live in a golden age of web development.
You can distribute your idea to the whole world, today.
Developers can launch apps faster than ever, and AI is transforming how we create. Staying ahead means embracing these rapid changes in tech.
The Age of Instant Deployment: A Developer's Dream
Unreal Championship was the first game ever to receive a downloadable patch to address performance issues.
This essentially means all games before had to be perfect on release day.
Something that’s difficult to grasp in today's web development world.
SaaS in the Blink of an Eye: A New Paradigm
You can create a SaaS in under an hour, and ship it to your client as a web app or PWA, targeting both browsers and mobile at the same time. Deploying commits to their machines as you push them to a repository.
If you’d like a practical intro into the world of PWAs, check out my latest book Building Cloud-Based PWAs with Supabase, React & TypeScript https://a.co/d/dWzDolV. I’m doubling the price next week!
This is a huge win for entrepreneurs and startups.
You can ship scrappy things and iterate faster until you find something people are willing to pay for.
AI as a Co-Founder: Augmenting Human Creativity
Market sentiment shows us that the AI hype is cooling down and we’re getting more realistic about what this new technology is capable of.
A stellar earnings report is supposed to lend wings to a company’s stock, but Nvidia’s share price fell sharply (by 6.4 per cent) the day after its earnings were released, and they have continued to fall. Yesterday (Tuesday 3 September) it fell further still; Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, is estimated to have lost $10bn in a single day.
The main reason for this apparently backwards situation is that the AI revolution has been priced in, even though it hasn’t actually happened. Nvidia represents a huge gamble by investors around the world, not only on a single technology – generative AI – but on a single company. It is the leading provider of the hardware and software being used to create the large language models that Big Tech has proclaimed to be the next big opportunity.
How Nvidia broke the market - New Statesman
As a dev, you don’t have trillions lying around but for $20/month you can code again.
https://x.com/akoskm/status/1828296109221126344?s=46
In this thread, I’ve got almost 200 replies and yes, Cursor, according to developers on 𝕏, is becoming part of their stack.
What Happens Next?
My first editor was Dreamweaver. Then when I got into PHP it was Notepad++.
Eclipse, Netbeans, Sublime, Atom, different IntelliJ flavors, VSCode, vim, I tried them all.
These were all free - except IntelliJ but my company paid for that.
But in essence, there was nothing that was monetized between developers turning their ideas into code, until recently.
Developers are plentiful and it’s not a market that’s shrinking.
What if the end goal is to bake a subscription into every programmer's life?
Thoughts?
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Thanks for the mention, Akos.
I personally dislike subscriptions because they become a fixed cost in your finances, something you can't get rid of in the future without downgrading your life.
I think we have to be very judicious with the ones we introduce. There are tools that really impact productivity when coding and others that are just hype and fanciness.
In some way, I'm happy the AI hype is cooling down. On another note I'm sad because it means I lost money on my investments hahaha
Have a great day!
Great perspective Akos.
I do feel that AI is here to stay but the grandiose promises are diminishing quite fast.
I personally hope that subscription products for developer productivity don't become a thing. It's not a great trend. The coolness of development is that everyone can program stuff without spending a lot and get better over time. I'd rather pay to learn new stuff or upskilling etc.
Thanks for the mention!