Building and Puzzling about Software

This originally started as a commentary on a link for the Weekly Thing and then got so long it became a blog post of its own. Many themes in this article start from my Software is Liquid article from April. The craft of building software is in the largest state of disruption I’ve experienced in my 30+ year career. AI is changing everything. All the inputs and outputs are in flux. And the fundamental patterns we’ve worked on are all being redefined. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen major disruption like this. My career starts with the web being born so I have no perspective before that, but I was part of the mobile and cloud transformations, and they profoundly impacted our craft. Releasing software thousands of times a month was an unlock to velocity that only the cloud could make happen. Laurie Voss suggests that we are all product engineers now. I think he is on the right path here, and one of his assertions landed hard with me. The demand for software is infinite. You may…