Build Faster with Nader Dabit

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Building software today is much faster than it was just a few years ago. The tools are higher level, and abstract away tasks that would have required months of development. Much of a developer’s time used to be spent optimizing databases, load balancers, and queueing systems in order to be able to handle the load created by thousands of users. Today, scalability is built into much of our infrastructure by default.

We have had several years of infrastructure with automatic scalability, and some of the more recent advances in developer tooling are about convenience, and faster development time. Developers are spending less time dealing with the ambiguous idea of a “server” and more time interacting with well-defined APIs and data sources.

A few examples are AppSync from Amazon Web Services and Firebase from Google. These tools are like databases with rich interactive functionality. Instead of having to create a server to listen to a database for changes and push notifications to users in response to those changes, AppSync and Firebase can be programmed to have this kind of functionality built in.

There are many other examples of high level APIs, rich backends, and developer productivity tools that lead to shorter development time. What does this mean for developers? It means we can build much faster. We can prototype quickly for low amounts of money–without sacrificing quality. We can spend more time focusing on design, user experience, and business models and less time focusing on keeping the application up and running.

Nader Dabit is a developer advocate at Amazon Web Services, and he returns to the show to discuss modern tooling, and how that tooling changes the potential for high output and fast iteration among developers. It is a strategic, philosophical discussion of how to build modern software.

Show Notes

State of React Native 2018

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