Software development: Self-deskilling/Self-perpetuating

I’ve been looking this morning at a mobile app building service called Conduit – it’s an interesting proposition: point it at a website and it will automatically generate Windows Phone, iOS and Android apps based on the content available (including RSS feeds, Twitter streams and Facebook content). Pay a one-off fee, or set up a paid subscription, and the service will even handle all of the marketplace submissions for you.

Whilst none of the apps outputted are likely to set the world alight, they do give quick and easy exposure in the world of the mobile apps.

It makes me realise that so much of the world of software development is, in essence, focused on removing the need for software development. Yet taking away an old market just seems to promote new opportunities rather than removing the need for programming altogether.

Take web development. Back in the mid-1990s I built the occasional website. By hand, in a text editor. Painstakingly editing the HTML code so that it would all render fine in the browsers of the day (Netscape and Internet Explorer…)

Then I got into ASP – a scripting language that enabled me to write code that would effectively write HTML automatically. It actually quite significantly increased the complexity of what I was doing (although that might have been down to my bad programming rather than anything inherently wrong with the ASP platform). Then. quite frankly, it got a bit to hard so I started managing teams of developers instead.

These days, if I wanted to set up a website (this one, for example) I would use software that has been written (WordPress) to enable me to worry about the hard work of the words, rather than the somewhat mundane issue of HTML tags. The code that sits behind WordPress is yet another order of complexity above things that I would have done myself – but the end output is way better.

So – maybe there is a rule here… if today something requires a programmer, and that something is generally useful, then within a certain period of time (a year, maybe. Or two) you’ll find that someone will have written code that will remove the requirement for the programmer. But that the programming skills will then be off doing something more interesting instead…