As a programmer, I’ve noticed a shift in the way younger coders approach their craft. Gone are the days of setting up servers at home, configuring networks, and manually tweaking Apache or MySQL. It’s not that these skills are no longer necessary, but rather that the ease of deployment on platforms like Vercel or Heroku has made them seem less appealing.
I remember the thrill of running my own Cassandra cluster on three Pentium IIIs back in 2008, just for the fun of it. There was a sense of accomplishment in getting everything to work together, and a deeper understanding of the underlying technology. But now, it seems like many young programmers are skipping this step altogether.
Is it because there’s just too much to learn, and the focus has shifted to other areas of development? Or is this a sign of a larger problem – that we’re losing the curiosity and experimentation that drove innovation in the first place?
I’m not advocating for a return to the dark ages of coding, but I do think there’s value in understanding the entire stack. By missing out on the ‘whole stack experience,’ are we creating a generation of programmers who are only surface-level experts?
What do you think? Are younger programmers simply taking a more pragmatic approach, or are we losing something essential in the process?