Looking Back on 10 Years of Computing

As the Heavybit team observes our 10th anniversary, we’re looking back to inform the future. We realized that the most interesting part of the last decade are the stories and insights from the developer community–the people who built the software and companies that created movements. So we’ve started compiling those stories to share with you! We’ve been struck by how much has changed over the years, and are excited to share this larger piece with you soon.

We could go in-depth about any one of these changes. As one founder pointed out, software dev practices changed rapidly in the past decade, so that

There's no difference between development or production. The first wave of DevOps was about teaching infra folks and ops folks to code and automate their work. Observability was the second wave of DevOps: Developers learning how to own their code in production.”

In addition, the role of developers within organizations changed dramatically. Another founder suggested that devs have become

Influencing decision-makers in purchasing decisions that weren't really fully understood or well-known. The respect for what a developer does and the expansion of what developers do has really changed. Being a developer started to switch from being treated like the janitor to being treated like a rock star.”

To jog your memory, here are a few big moments from the last 10 years. Where were you when:

• Java, the #1 programming language of 2013 lost its crown to Python?
• Software development moved to the cloud–and the cloud became a battleground between AWS (a $2B business in 2013 expanded 45x in 2023) and Azure (a $1B business in 2013 expanded 55x in 2023)?
• Movements reshaped software development, like:
  • Agile overtaking Waterfall
  • Developers running operations
  • Dev teams taking on merge conflicts with CI/CD
  • Observability emerging to monitor reliability in continuous dev environments
  • Virtualization evolving into containerization via Docker and K8s
  • The whole world of software turning to APIs?
• We saw launches of popular tools and languages, like:
  • Slack (2013)
  • Docker (2013)
  • Chef (2013)
  • React (2013)
  • Databricks (2013)
  • LaunchDarkly (2014)
  • Snyk (2014)
  • VSCode (2015)
  • K8s (2015)
  • TensorFlow (2015)
  • Angular (2016)
  • PyTorch (2016)
  • GitHub CoPilot (2021)
  • ChatGPT (2022)
• Massive open-source projects became household names, like Git, Python, JavaScript, Jenkins (and others)?

Coming Soon: Join Us for A Celebration of Community Voices

Stay tuned for the whole community story–not just on where we’ve been, but also where we’re headed, and where new founders should focus with their startups. We can’t wait to see what the next decade holds for all of us.

Any important milestones or stories you want to make sure we don’t miss? Let us know via content@heavybit.com or on Twitter @heavybit!