Future of Software Development as a Career

Couple of months ago I used AWS API Gateway for the first time. I had heard about it but used it for the first time. It wasn't my choice but was asked to use by engineering leadership at my job. I do not really have an opinion about AWS API Gateway. This post is not about if API Gateway is good or bad. What bothered me was that I considered writing good REST APIs as one of my strong skills and now looking at API Gateway that skill felt redundant. Anyone with minimal understanding of how REST APIs work can go to AWS console and spin-up a fresh endpoint. It did feel a little bit like they took our job.

There are a lot of SaaS out there like API Gateway which make products more of an outcome of software configuration rather than an outcome of software development. As these SaaS grow, very few people will actually bother developing software and instead build products by using different SaaS. This makes perfect sense, because that way collectively we are not solving same problems again and again. We are re-using well proven solutions and not wasting time collectively.

But it does feel a little bit weird personally to me that professionally I have to configure software written by someone else rather than writing my own. Writing code and see it work is the most satisfying thing as a developer, that unfortunately won't be a thing you can do professionally in future. At least that is how I feel. I won't be surprised if we start seeing more "Software Orchestrator" and less "Software Developer" job postings soon.