Never been as good as now for creating software

When I started building software 25 years ago, one had to pay for everything, even a basic C compiler was not free. There was no internet, no Linux, no OpenSource.

The computing world has really moved on.

Now when one starts a project there is a whole range of OpenSource building blocks one can choose from. And really cool stuff too. In no particular order here are some of the projects that have excited me in recent times:

• CoreCLR
• grpc
• Protocol Buffers
• Apache Zookeeper
• RocksDB
• Lua
• LuaJIT
• Visual Studio Code
• libuv
• node.js
• LLVM

One could go on. The wealth of knowledge that is now accessible to all is tremendous, and it is all there for anyone who is interested. 

I think this is our time - we who create software. The world is being changed forever as software will drive everything everywhere, and we, the software creators, are at the core of this revolution.

From Java to C#

I am using C# for the first time in a major new project. This has been made possible thanks to Microsoft's open sourcing C# and making it cross platform. I am using C# both on the client desktop as well as the server backend.

My initial impression is that as a language C# is much more productive than Java!

If only Microsoft had done this earlier - the programming landscape might have been quite different today. Java still has an advantage of a larger eco-system in the opensource world, especially when it comes to writing server applications.