Gosh, Things ARE Better for Developers These Days

Let's take a moment to appreciate how much has improved, in a developer's lot, over the last decade. In particular, contemplate how many "basic" programming concepts and "everybody knows" knowledge didn't exist in your life.

I've written a lot of computing nostalgia articles, from Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss to Technologies We're Glad Are Dead, and I sometimes fear that there's a little wistfulness in my voice. But the truth is that we (as technologists as well as software creators) are far better off than we used to be.

To highlight some of the improvements, in this post I identify several programming concepts that have entered the "ordinary" developers' awareness in that last 10 years. (I got help from several kind people on LinkedIn.) Perhaps you'll appreciate how far we've come, and how much easier things have become for those who need to crank out working software on a boss's or client's unreasonable schedule. (Or at least we like to think they make things easier.)

The first problem in doing so, though, is deciding what we can claim "existed" a decade back. Because plenty of programming techniques were invented or discovered long before that... they just weren't considered ordinary, a concept that even the most naive of developers are familiar with. I'm not speaking here of competence, just awareness. Or, look at it this way: A decade back, you'd have considered knowledge of these unique enough to call out on a resume; today, it's common knowledge, or so endemic that the technique is built into your development tools.

For example, design patterns were around since the book was published in 1994. But for years their use remained... not esoteric, exactly, but certainly something expected only from senior developers. Arguably, design pattern expertise was how you proved you were an expert. Nowadays, developer tools assume that you at least know what a design pattern is, if they don't offer features to align with them.

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