I always like trying to predict the future, even though getting it right is hard. I find it fun to look at the past and present and see which path the world seems to be taking.

The first programming language I fell in love with was C#. I cannot say why. I had already worked with VB.NET and Java at the time, but Microsoft’s ecosystem and Visual Studio 2010 gave me some comfort in the unfamiliar world of programming.

A lot has changed, and I have changed as a professional too. I kept learning new things, and overnight a whole new world of front-end development appeared that I did not know. Angular, React, Vue: choose your player. I was too used to Bootstrap and jQuery, and it took me a while to understand why this change happened and all the advantages it brought.

FaaS

If there was a revolution on the front end, on the back end we saw the rise of RESTful APIs and the MVC pattern, with some apps using BFF. All of that was fine, but what I found most interesting was serverless.

With the massive move to the cloud, we left local servers behind. With Docker, we left virtual machines behind. With the creation of Lambda functions, perhaps we will leave APIs as we know them behind.

AWS as a back end

Amazon dominates the cloud market today. It moved first and is now reaping the rewards. One very interesting thing to look at is the Free Tier, meaning products that are free up to a certain limit.

For example: DynamoDB up to 25 GB. AWS Lambda up to 1 million free executions per month. AWS Cognito up to 50,000 users.

That made me think that it is now possible to build a complete application at no cost.

Gatsby as a front end

Gatsby is one of these static-site generators, like Jekyll, Hugo, and so on. It is written entirely in JavaScript, natively supports React, and uses GraphQL. Today, it is possible to host static sites at no cost, for example on Netlify.

Conclusion

We really are living in an age of abundance. There are more movies, games, and songs than we could consume in our entire lives, for the price of a monthly subscription or even at no cost through other means.

As the cost of running a data center falls, that abundance is already becoming tangible. Today, it is possible to build a system with zero maintenance cost, 24/7 availability, and redundant data.

It is amazing. ✨

Where could this lead? I believe the cost of some services will drop significantly, while a huge space opens up for free and open-source systems, or pay-as-you-go services.

The only cost that remains is the labor required to create and maintain these systems. Information is abundant and free, but knowledge has never been more valuable than it is today.