Where Have All the Developers Gone Mulesoft's Mariano González Begs the Question

I was reading a recent post from Mulesoft’s Mariano González announcing that Mule 3.6 will provide state of the art, 100% compliance support for XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 for developers using the XML data storage format. My thoughts here are not about the announcement, you can check it out yourself on the Mulesoft blog.

While looking through other entries on the Mulesoft blog I found another post from González titled “Rise and Fall of the Black Box Developer.” The subject of his post was that developers have increasingly become slaves to the utilization of the frameworks they work with, but have lost the ability to manipulate these frameworks as these platforms have become more sophisticated. 

He sums it up here, “My point is that having teams of developers who are so caught up with the abstraction that frameworks provide allow companies to quickly build minimum viable products. But because those devs are not aware of the inner machinery underneath, because their mind is bound by the limits of the black box, when the time comes to address performance issues, to handle scalability problems, to make sure that the object model is flexible enough to easily accommodate changes – in those times – these developers won’t have the necessary tools to be successful.”

Of course, one quote does not a blog post make and to fully appreciate what he is trying to communicate, check out the post itself.

After reading his thoughts, it reminded me something that our editor, Richard Harris, always is telling me, “There is so much noise out there,” referring to the ever expanding breadth of products, tools and services available for developers today. A proficient and long time developer who has worked in corporate IT as well as running his own Indie dev shop, he often also comments on how he, like many other developers he knows, exist in their own world and rarely peek to see what’s outside.

And there is a lot out there. We are in the business of reporting and tracking relevant developer centric industry information and even we don’t have a complete handle on everything that is out there. How can a developer juggle the 50 things on his/her plate and realistically have time to truly engage with anything outside their comfort zone - or fully dive deep into what actually is in their comfort zone?

It’s a question I don’t have an answer for but one thing is for sure for our media platform, the industry is coming up with new solutions every day, and it’s not going to slow down. All we can do is use our platform to help distill the noise for you.